‘We all need to work together for the children and young people of Hull’

CHALLENGE: Pauline Turner, Director of Children’s Services at Hull City Council. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography

Pauline Turner joined Hull City Council as its new Director of Children’s Services following a damning Ofsted report which rated the care for vulnerable children as inadequate. In her first media interview since being appointed in December last year, she spoke to Rick Lyon about the challenges the authority faces to turn things around and the progress made so far, despite the impact of Covid-19

What progress has the council made in addressing the serious issues identified by Ofsted?

“I think children’s services was perhaps quite insular within the council. That’s been one of the big changes for me. Not only have we got external scrutiny, we also now have that internal challenge and support.

“There’s a real keen interest across the council in our improvement activity. I understand we now have closer working relationships internally and externally than we did previously.

“Covid has obviously been an incredible challenge, but it’s also given us the opportunity to build those relationships. Ofsted have said they’ve seen that as a real step change, so that’s a positive.

“We’ve done a lot of work internally to support the work of social care services. We’re co-ordinating our training and approach better now.

“We’ve introduced ‘Signs of Safety’, which is a framework of how we work with our families to understand what their strengths are and help them when things aren’t going so well. In moments of crisis, we can then turn to their strengths.

“That’s given our staff a language to use with our families and partners. It’s a recognised, evidence-based approach that came from Australia and is used widely in the UK and across Europe.

“It’s a really good model that our frontline workers can now employ.

“We will always have children in care and the latest figure we have is 928, which we know is high.

“We’ve had to consider changing a number of our working practices. Some children have remained in care when, over time, as things settled down when a child was living with another relative, we could have gone back to court and said that we, as the local authority, don’t need to be involved anymore and this child no longer needs a social worker.

“I think we’ve maybe missed some opportunities where things are working well with a child living with another relative and we could have discharged them. We’ve identified a number of those cases and we’re working with those families to see if we can discharge the involvement of the local authority now.

“We can’t make that decision – it is for the courts to do it – but it’s about thinking more about that.

“We’re also working to get some other families more settled first, to see if we can then take a step back from them.

“It’s about changing practice to be able to say we think these family members are able to look after a child.

“There are also children who have come into care when they were younger and things have changed. Circumstances can change over time and this is another group we’re looking at, to see if things have changed within their birth family, so they don’t have to remain with one of our foster families.

“We’re looking to see if we can move some of those children back to their families because things have changed and, perhaps, we haven’t been looking at that before.”

What are the underlying reasons for such a high number of children being placed in care in Hull?

“There are a number of issues which surround why any child needs to be in care and we’ve had to do a lot of work around that.

“We’ve had to look at how well we assess the risks in the first place, in order to understand and be able to work with people on not just the symptoms, but the underlying causes.

“Some of our work needs to be a bit deeper.

“We can look at our statistical neighbours in terms of levels of deprivation, having city status, being towards the edge of the country, and we know there have been a number of Government schemes in cities like this.

“It’s not just down to one thing, there are a number of things that contribute towards it. Part of it is the issues we see in the city that aren’t just specific to Hull, but are issues nationally.

“One of our concerns is around domestic abuse, for example. We’re putting a lot of work into supporting those families, including how they can access the support they need.

“We had to rearrange community support to help people and rethink how we delivered our services because of Covid.”

PROGRESS: Pauline Turner says improvements are being made to services for vulnerable children in Hull. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography

How much more difficult has the pandemic made it to tackle the issues the council faces with services for vulnerable children?

“The improvements we’ve made have been alongside Covid. I do think we would have made more progress if it wasn’t for the pandemic, in all honestly.

“But I think the staff have done tremendously well, and Ofsted have recognised that. There’s been enough on to deal with the pandemic, never mind improving services at the same time.

“The two have had to go hand in hand because we couldn’t put some things off. It has meant we’ve had to find different ways to do things and I give all credit to the staff.

“We’ve had to do a lot of training. The Signs of Safety I mentioned was a really big piece of training delivered not only internally, but in schools and with partners such as the police and the health service, and we’ve probably got more people to these briefing sessions because they haven’t had to physically attend in person.

“More than 1,600 people have been trained in Signs of Safety to date, including elected members and 600 people within partner organisations across the city.

“That’s really important because we all need to work together for the children and young people of Hull.

“So, although it has obviously been difficult and challenging because we’ve had to rethink things, there have been some benefits.”

How has the council responded to the intervention by Ofsted?

“The level of intervention from Ofsted means we should have been having monitoring visits, but they haven’t been able to do these during lockdown.

“Having intervention does bring its own pressure, but we work really well with Ofsted. It’s important that we don’t just prepare for an inspection and instead we focus on delivering improved services to children so that, when Ofsted do come in, we shouldn’t be worried about that.

“If we deliver good services Ofsted will find that we deliver good services.

“We had a two-day assurance visit in March. These visits are not graded, but they found that, even with Covid, we’ve been able to move things forward.

“The main thing they pointed to in all of the cases they looked at was that, in the past they’d found children they had to flag to us because they were at risk, whereas this time they felt there weren’t any children who were at an immediate risk of harm.

“It meant we’d already picked up what we were most concerned about and we were already starting to work with those families.

“We’ve reconfigured our ‘front door’ to early help and social care and, although we still have some things to sort out around that, Ofsted were pleased to see that we’d managed to do that, despite Covid.

“We have a lot of partners working together on this and, as a result, Ofsted were reassured we’ve been able to take that prompt action.

“We will be having the monitoring visits now and you usually get between four and six of those after a big inspection that hasn’t gone particularly well.

“We’ll be working in conjunction with Ofsted on these, as they’re part of our improvement journey and it’s about monitoring our progress.

“After the monitoring visits there will be a graded inspection, after which we’d hope to be released from intervention.”

CONFIDENT: The city council’s children’s services department is tackling the issues highlighted by Ofsted, says Pauline Turner. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography

Are you confident the authority is on course to make the required improvements to be released from intervention and reassure the people of Hull that services for vulnerable children are much improved?

“I am.

“We’ve developed an improvement plan, which picks up on everything that was in the inspection report and also everything in our own internal mechanisms.

“I think what may have gone really wrong for us was that we didn’t have enough internal mechanisms for our own checking. One of the main things in our improvement plan was to build that in, so we know ourselves what is happening.

“We’ve developed much more data and, whilst data isn’t the be-all and end-all, it helps us to see if we’re doing things in good time and if we’re doing them consistently. Are we visiting children often enough? Are staff getting support from their manager through one-to-one supervision regularly enough?

“That helps us count things and we count things to analyse them and see if there are any gaps.

“So, if workers aren’t able to get to see their children often enough, it’s about being able to understand why that’s happening. It points us towards some hotspots and we’re then able to dig down and understand why certain things are happening.

“We didn’t really have that overarching picture before.

“That’s the quantitative side of things and alongside that we’ve developed much stronger quality assurance. This includes a whole range of auditing activity and we’re doing a lot more audits of cases of individual children. These are done independently from the team where the work sits.

“That’s why we’ve been able to discharge some children from care, because we’ve audited a lot more cases.

“We’ve also done an awful lot of work relating to our SEND [special educational needs and disability] children.

“We’re about to launch our SEND strategy. It was delayed, but the reason was that we really wanted to build it with parents of SEND children, so we’ve had listening sessions.

“That’s allowed a lot of our SEND parents and children to express their views and we worked really hard to understand what it’s like for the parents of a SEND child, and therefore what would make a difference.

“I’m really proud that it’s been worked up with the families that are most affected. There’s work to do, but we’ve started to regain the trust of those parents because we are listening and we want to improve.

“The work we’ve done with schools has been another real positive. We’ve introduced social workers in schools, which is another example of us wanting to help as early as possible.

“By having a social worker in school, they are able to support the teachers and alert them to any potential issues, so we can address them at the earliest possible point in time.

“That’s the sort of work we’ve been doing. So, although we have Ofsted coming in every so often, there’s a lot more happening internally.

“The staff here have a real commitment to improving children’s services and that’s why I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction.”