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Children's Homes

I welcome the new Children and Young Persons Bill, which aims to reform the statutory framework for the care system and to ensure that children and young people receive high quality care and support. The Bill also aims to improve the outcomes for children in care compared with those of their peers and to improve placement stability. I want to focus tonight on a crucial tool for helping to improve outcomes for children in care and the quality of inspections of children's homes. I have felt strongly about the importance of robust inspection for many years, ever since I was a social worker in the 1980s. In 1984, I introduced a ten-minute Bill to ensure that children's homes of fewer than four children were properly registered, which they were not in those days. There are about 6,500 children in children's homes and hostels in England, which is 11 per cent. of the total number of children. The latest data show that those children tend to be older—14 per cent. are aged 10 to 15 years and 23 per cent. are 16 and over. Many of them have complex needs and display challenging behaviour. If we are to improve outcomes for them, it is all the more important that we have high quality care. We need rigorous inspections of children's homes so that poorly run homes can be made to improve or close. It is only with a good care environment that young people will achieve better educational outcomes. Without the support of their corporate parents, that will not be possible. That means not only the social worker but the care home. I welcome the measures in the Children and Young Persons Bill to enable registration authorities to issue compliance notices to children's home providers who are failing to meet required standards, and to impose a notice preventing new admissions to an establishment where they are deemed inappropriate. That will make it easier to enforce minimum standards. In order to get to the stage of taking action against homes, however, we need more rigorous inspection regimes to be introduced. We have to ensure that children's homes provide the standards of care necessary to improve outcomes for the children looked after. All children's homes are required to be registered under the Care Standards Act 2000. Ofsted is now responsible for the inspection of children's homes, having taken over the role from the Commission for Social Care Inspection in April 2007. Children's homes are subject to detailed statutory regulations and national minimum standards. The framework for inspection reports is the five outcomes in Every Child Matters, which formed the basis of the Children Act 2004. The five outcomes by which children's homes are inspected are being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a contribution and achieving economic well-being. I believe that particularly in relation to children's welfare and running away, some of the minimum care standards and how they translate to the five Every Child Matters outcomes are too general. That can lead to inspection reports that do not show the forensic detail that is needed. I became interested in inspections after I was recently alerted by my local community safety team in Stockport to concerns that it had about what it saw as the inadequacies of Ofsted inspection reports on some children's homes in my constituency. The team had catalogued numerous instances of problems involving children at the homes, and felt that the inspection reports did not reflect the true picture of what was actually going on there. The team provided me with evidence of large numbers of children running away, going missing, repeat offending and committing assaults and criminal damage, which was not reflected in the reports under any of the general inspection headings. That antisocial behaviour was causing problems for local residents living near the homes, and the team was worried that if the incidents were not being highlighted, other agencies could not provide the interventions needed to help the young people involved to correct their behaviour. Stockport has a very high number of children and young people placed in our children's homes from other local authority areas. Indeed, 53 per cent. of all looked-after children in Stockport are from out of the borough, compared with a national average of 35 per cent. Many of the young people who were causing problems and had attracted the attention of the community safety team had been exported into Stockport from outside the borough. I am pleased that the new Children and Young Persons Bill addresses that problem and is intended to limit out-of-authority placements. I decided to apply for reports of 10 children's homes in Stockport from Ofsted, to check for myself the quality of inspections. The first problem that I encountered was getting hold of a copy of the reports, which were not available on the Ofsted website. I applied for them and received a letter saying that my request was being dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I objected, and of course I was immediately supplied with the reports, but my point is that they are not easily accessible. As I have said, I had detailed statistics about the many incidents of children going missing and about assaults and criminal damage in and around those homes, committed by the residents, yet those statistics were not reflected in the reports. Even without that important information, four of the homes were officially classed as ““inadequate””, three as ““satisfactory”” and only three as ““good””. My point is that the reports contained no context or overview about how often children were getting into trouble or going missing. Without that, we cannot truly assess whether the care provided by the homes helps to manage or stabilise the behaviour of young people, or whether the homes are meeting the standards for safeguarding children under the Every Child Matters criteria. It cannot be right, for example, that the inspection report into one Stockport home failed to mention that one young person had run away 89 times. Another report did not mention that there had been 69 cases of residents going missing, six assaults and 31 incidents of criminal damage nearby. Under the regulations, the home should promote and make proper provision for the welfare of children, as well as for the care, education and supervision and, where appropriate, the treatment of children accommodated there. The national minimum standards call for written records of all incidents of absconding and the reasons given by the child for running away. However, there is no requirement for those incidents to be included in the inspection reports and so they are not being reflected under the staying safe criterion. I think that they should be. I am particularly concerned that three of the homes in Stockport—all managed by the same organisation—were given notice to improve last year and were classed as ““inadequate””. Since then, two of those three homes have been inspected again and have now been classed as ““satisfactory””. However, it is not clear to me what level of improvements have been made to warrant moving from a rating of ““inadequate”” to ““satisfactory””. Again, the problem is that the inspection categories are too general. Another children's home in Stockport, which has a different owner and charges up to £4,250 a week per child, has sent out advertising flyers trying to attract placements for prolific and priority offenders from areas outside Stockport. The flyers say:"““Our aim is to drastically reduce offending behaviour and achieve positive outcomes for the most challenging young people””." However, the community safety team has given me detailed times and dates of incidents involving two clients that reveal that the home is failing dramatically in this stated aim. In the case of one young person, who was already electronically tagged, there were more than 35 incidents over nine months. The incidents ranged from assault, burglary, missing from home, criminal damage, punching and biting care workers, throwing a knife at another resident and stealing a vehicle. The other young person had 15 similar incidents. The relevant Ofsted inspection report did not reflect any of the above cited behaviour. After reading the reports on the 10 children's homes in Stockport, I wrote to Ofsted to express my concerns about the lack of thoroughness of the inspection reports. Since then, I have had a very helpful meeting with Michael Hart, Ofsted's children's director, and Andrew Mercer, an assistant divisional manager in the children's directorate. They assured me they had taken on board my concerns and would feed them into the on-going review of national minimum standards for children's homes. I am also grateful to the Minister for allowing me the opportunity to raise some of those concerns at a recent meeting. I want, through this debate, to put my concerns on the record, together with what I hope will be his positive response to them. I believe that a number of steps can be taken to improve inspections. The first point that I raised was the importance of the reports being made more freely available. I would like to see them published as a matter of course on the Ofsted website, and I understand that Ofsted is now consulting on that. At the moment, the inspection reports only go as a matter of course to the owner of the home, whether local authority or private. I believe that they should go as a matter of course to the placing authority, to the authority in which the home operates, and also to the schools and agencies responsible for tackling crime and disorder in the area. If a home is deemed to be inadequate, the placing authority should put its reasons for continuing the placements on the child's record. I would also like statistics to be published that show the number of homes and their inspection categories, so that we can see the impact of inspections in improving standards—just as happens with the school league tables. If local agencies have a responsibility for dealing with the behaviour and education of all looked-after children in their area, they should also be aware of the quality of care being provided. I want the reports to be better informed, with inspectors seeking the views of local agencies such as crime reduction partnerships, community safety teams and schools in advance of their visits. I accept the usefulness of random visits but I also feel that, if the police and schools were consulted on their views about the homes and the activities of residents before the visits, the reports would be better informed and consequently more useful. Also, it would encourage homes to work more co-operatively with local agencies if they knew that those agencies would be asked for their views in inspection reports. Does the Minister agree that as part of the inspection process, it would be a good idea to invite comments from local crime reduction partnerships, community safety teams and other agencies about antisocial behaviour, offending and running away by young people in such homes to help inform the inspection reports? Does he also agree that it would be useful if schools were consulted about the level of support that care homes provide to pupils, the amount of communication between teachers and care home staff, and the performance of pupils in care? I suggest that the national minimum care standards be updated so that inspection reports contain a summary and proper evaluation of all incidents of running away, assaults and criminal damage. That would enable placing authorities better to evaluate the control mechanisms in place in the home, so that they can manage behaviour and assess whether the home properly met the staying safe criterion. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, North (Helen Jones) for all her hard work on the all-party group on runaway and missing children. As secretary of that group, I know that many of the 100,000 children who go missing every year come to some harm. One in six is forced to sleep rough or with strangers, and one in 12 is harmed. I would therefore argue that incidents in which children go missing from children's homes should be recorded under the staying safe criterion of the inspection reports. I know that when some children go missing, they are just staying out late at a friend's house, but for others the result is more serious. We must find a way of assessing the seriousness of ““missing”” incidents and why they happened. I am concerned that, owing to the way in which inspection reports are structured, they are not effective tools for achieving minimum standards or improving standards. If we are to improve outcomes for looked-after children, we must not only enforce minimum standards but use inspection reports to drive up standards. Ofsted inspections have been a vital tool in doing that in our schools, but if care standards are to be effective in improving standards in our children's homes, they need to be more prescriptive in what is taken into account in the inspection, need to include other agencies' observations, and must be widely published and available.