Inspection report for children's home
Unique reference number SC405470
Inspection date 14/10/2013
Inspector Seka Graovac
Type of inspection Full
Provision subtype Residential special school (>295 days/year)
Date of last inspection 18/03/2013
Inspection Report: 14/10/2013 2 of 9
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Inspection Report: 14/10/2013 3 of 9
Service information
Brief description of the service
This home is located within a non-maintained special school. It is open Monday to Thursday term time and throughout holidays. The service is accessible to additional children, not just those attending this school. It provides short break and sleep-over services for children aged two to 14 years who have a visual impairment and additional profound and complex needs.
The inspection judgements and what they mean
Outstanding: a service of exceptional quality that significantly exceeds minimum requirements
Good: a service of high quality that exceeds minimum requirements
Adequate: a service that only meets minimum requirements Inadequate: a service that does not meet minimum requirements
Overall effectiveness
The overall effectiveness is judged to be outstanding.
This service is exceptionally effective at enhancing lives of children with profound, multiple and complex needs, including children who are blind or partially sighted. Through highly personalised care and excellent safeguarding practice, staff enable children to develop a deep sense of well-being and safety. In the words of one parent, 'The home provides a unique and well structured environment which helps children thrive and really feel secure.'
Through accessing an extensive range of experiences, children have excellent opportunities for engagement, learning and development. They make great progress across different aspects of their welfare. Their cognition, mobility, social skills, emotional balance, confidence and enjoyment have grown immensely. Their educational achievements are excellent. Their increased ability to understand options and to make and communicate choices means that they are much more able to develop their individuality, interact with people and form relationships. As a result the children are more able to actively participate in life.
The service is delivered within a strong multi-professional partnership and close working with children's parents. Within this context, the home's records evidence its significant contribution to children's development and progress. Both children and their parents are extremely happy with the service.
Leaders and managers effectively use comprehensive and robust monitoring processes, as well as current research to firmly guide continuous improvement of the service.
Outcomes for children and young people
Outcomes for young people are outstanding.
Within the constraints of their complex and profound needs, children make excellent progress across different aspects of their development.
Their health needs are fully met. They receive high level of personal care that is delivered with competence and in a sensitive and unobtrusive manner.
Children attend their schools regularly and their educational progress is very strong. For example, out of five children working towards P level attainment in the school where the home is located, four have achieved outstanding progress. The other child has only recently started using the short break service.
Children engage in a wide range of activities within the home environment and in the community. One parent described the service as Disneyland, a safe dream-place full of wonderful facilities for children to have fun together with other children. Experiencing new things enriches their lives and provides them with great opportunities to develop their skills, confidence and social integration. One parent commented without this high quality service, their child would not have had the same developmental opportunities. Children who use this service have flourished and blossomed.
Their understanding of what is happening around them and their ability to communicate have significantly improved. They have become much more able to clearly and constructively express themselves. For example, when they arrived from school, they signalled being tired and not wanting to engage. Staff carefully observed, listened, understood, verbalised their understanding, respected the children's feelings and gave them the quiet time they needed. After a short settling period, children fully recognised where they were and their faces became lit up with sheer joy. They started interacting with staff members with great interest, focus and engagement.
Children have been able to form and sustain appropriate attachments with staff. For many of them, this is the first time that they have developed a close relationship with adults who are not their parents. This is a significant progress for them in terms of their emotional and social development. A parent commented how this was a crucial element in preparing their child to move onto a special residential school provision. It also helped this parent to prepare for the next stage in their child's life.
Other parents singled out different aspects of progress that they felt have had the most significant and highly positive impact on the quality of their children's lives. Some examples of this are: a child has established a sound sleeping pattern and accepted regular daily routines; a child's behaviour has improved and they have
become much happier and easier to manage when back home with their families and a child has started using a cup to drink from, instead of a bottle.
All children have become more able to understand the options, make a choice and communicate it more clearly.
Quality of care
The quality of the care is outstanding.
Staff place the well-being of children at the centre of their practice. Parents describe staff as wonderful, amazing, dedicated and incredibly caring. Both parents and social workers say that the management and staff are highly professional and the quality of the whole service is excellent. Parents also used following words to describe the quality of the service their children receive: exceptional, outstanding, fantastic, impressive, perfect, absolutely brilliant, tremendously good, welcoming, friendly, flexible, calm and balanced in challenging situations, bending over backwards to be helpful and going beyond the usual expectations of what is good.
Staff implement a high quality, fully personalised and holistic care planning that is underpinned by multi-disciplinary approach, effectively and with great sensitivity. Staff have in-depth knowledge and understanding of children and their complex needs. They are able to effectively communicate with children and advocate for what is best for them.
They work in very close partnership with other professionals and parents to consistently deploy creative strategies to ensure that any removable barriers to children's progress and development are effectively challenged. A number of health service professionals, such as nurses, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists are based at the school. Their professional support and advice, and training they deliver to staff, adds considerably to the excellent quality of the short-break service.
Staff identify targets for individual children that clearly link with their curriculum and the other development plans they have, such as visual stimulation programmes, paediatric mobility and physiology goals, and goals relating to the promotion of their communication and social development.
Children's progress is closely monitored and flexibly adjusted to ensure that their achievements are promoted in the most effective way. A wide range of resources including sensory, tactile, audio and video is available to promote children's sensory perception and learning.
The environment is exceptionally well equipped, as well as being beautiful and homely. There is a garden with a floor-level trampoline, an interactive fountain, giant chimes and various plants. Everything is thoughtfully designed to enable children's engagement and aid their sensory and general development. An on-site hydro-therapy pool is also available and it is used by the families during school holidays to provide opportunities for the families to have fun together. A parent talked about the effort the home puts in making sure that children's rooms are highly personalised for their short stay, as one of the many examples of how staff take the greatest care about every single aspect of the service provision.
Both parents and social workers commented very positively about the home's significant and meaningful contribution at the reviews and at other professional meetings that focus on children's progress and development. A parent, whose child used the respite service for many years before moving to a residential special school and also, a social worker who was recently involved in moving some children to a different service, highlighted how well this was managed by the home and how supportive the staff were. Another parent whose child recently started using the overnight stays thought that the admission process was particularly well managed.
In addition to what short break services usually offer, this home also offers a sleep-over facility for the children's friends. This nurtures their friendships and facilitates the development of their social skills.
Safeguarding children and young people
The service is outstanding at keeping children and young people safe and feeling safe.
Safeguarding children and promoting their welfare is at the heart of the service provision. Comprehensive and highly effective safeguarding arrangements, systems, policies and procedures are in place. The organisation's Safeguarding Quality and Compliance Team maintain a robust oversight and lead on the development of safe practice. This is done jointly with the two designated child protection and safeguarding officers, one of whom is the Registered Manager for the home.
The regular training ensures that the management and staff consistently maintain a high level of safeguarding awareness and up to date knowledge. The latest updates focused on learning from the most recent serious case reviews and on improved risk management relating to slips and trips for people with visual impairment.
Through consistently implemented high quality care, the home has enabled children to develop a deep sense of safety and well-being. They are relaxed and happy in their environment or when with staff outside the home. This feeling of safety that they have developed enables them to engage more in exploratory behaviours. They have new experiences and better learning and development opportunities.
Robust risk management ensures that they are safe and protected at all times. Risk management process is highly individualised. Each child has an up to date personal emergency evacuation plan. There is a clear protocol in place for electronic monitoring of children which sensitively balances protecting them with safeguarding their privacy.
Parents report having full trust in staff. They are confident that their children are safe while on a short respite break in this home. They benefit from being able to relax in this knowledge. For example, one parent recently wrote in the questionnaire: 'It is a great comfort to know my child is safe and well cared for.’ The service has a very positive impact on the families of children who use it. A parent gave an example of robust safeguarding practice when the manager challenged a discrepancy in medication information available. This discrepancy had gone unnoticed by other professionals involved and the parent themselves.
There have been no major incidents of any kind since the last inspection: no child protection or safeguarding concerns, no bullying, no incidents of children going missing and no need for staff to intervene physically to protect children or adults. The service is highly effective at safeguarding children and promoting their welfare.
Leadership and management
The leadership and management of the children's home are outstanding.
Leaders and managers have a strong drive to provide care of exceptional quality to children and their families. The vision for the service that enables children with multiple and complex sensory and learning needs to achieve fulfilment has been effectively channelled through different levels of the organisation.
The service is exceptionally well managed by the registered manager who has many years of management and nursing experience. The stability of the management and the staff team contributes to the consistency of their commitment to embody this vision in their approach and practice. A comprehensive training programme ensures that staff's knowledge is kept up to date on a wide range of topics. It also supports the staff's professional development, as well as their enthusiasm to provide children with the best support possible. Children receive care from highly competent and well-supported staff.
The home's drive for continuous improvement is underpinned by rigorous monitoring activities and quality assurance processes. Ofsted regularly receives monitoring reports that clearly show that stringent monitoring takes place. Leaders and managers are transparent about their findings and have firm motivation to identify any areas for further development.
The service has a history of providing excellent service. The overall effectiveness of the service was judged as outstanding at the last two full inspections. These inspection reports do not identify any areas for improvement.
Since the last inspection, the management has focused the improvement activity on being able to better demonstrate the difference the home has made in children's lives. Children's files reflect exceptionally well how the service meets their needs within the multi-professional context, the progress they have made and the aims of the future development.
A service development plan is in place that is clearly based on robust monitoring, realistic self-appraisal and relentless motivation to keep on providing what is best for children and their families. Some of the actions identified relate to how the service can prepare itself in the event of a child suddenly dying while using a short break service.
About this inspection
The purpose of this inspection is to assure children and young people, parents, the public, local authorities and government of the quality and standard of the service provided. The inspection was carried out under the Care Standards Act 2000 to assess the effectiveness of the service and to consider how well it complies with the relevant regulations and meets the national minimum standards.
The report details the main strengths, any areas for improvement, including any breaches of regulation, and any failure to meet national minimum standards. The judgements included in the report are made against the Inspections of children’s homes – framework for inspection and the evaluation schedule for the inspection of children's homes.