I struggled to find much rational, relevant or useful content in Ofsted’s consultation document on the future of social care inspection, which I have only just got around to reading.
It seems to be full of carefully crafted
but essentially vacuous phrases which might be important if only somebody had
taken the trouble to explain what they mean. The chief culprit is “focus on the
things that matter most to children’s lives” which sounds commendably child centred on first hearing, but
which unravels into virtual meaningless unless we have more information about
how these ‘things’ are uncovered and validated.
Ofsted says its inspectors
regularly talk to children about what matters to them, but they don’t say what
methods they use to draw valid conclusions and, mysteriously, they don’t give
any hint in the consultation paper about what these conclusions are. So ‘the
things that matter most to children’ could be anything that Ofsted wants them
to be – a very convenient catch-all that makes the inspectorate appear pro-child without having to accept that
children may not agree with the way in which it goes about its business.
And two key words I would have expected to
find in any document about inspecting child protection services – safety and quality – do not occur at all in the document. How anybody can
write a 38-page document on inspecting children’s services without using both
of those words frequently is a complete mystery to me.
Rather than focusing on how inspection
could contribute to creating safer and higher quality services (a question
which is intellectually challenging), the document takes an essentially superficial and bureaucratic approach that simply introduces new nomenclature (such as ‘modular
inspections’) and reconfigured arrangements (such as inspecting ‘good’
authorities less and ‘inadequate’ ones more) which are frankly irrelevant to
service improvement and to making children safer and happier.
In short the
whole document seems to be driven by a desire to tidy-up Ofsted’s organisation and
processes at the expense of doing anything that might be truly effective. It’s
all very sad.
