Inspection of Children’s Services: Isle of Anglesey County Council

We inspected services for children at Isle of Anglesey County Council in November 2016, and carried out a follow-up inspection to assess the improvements made in October this year.

You can read the 2016 report here.

Our October 2018 inspection looked at whether families were empowered to access help, care and support services, and the quality of outcomes achieved for children.

Inspectors also considered the quality of leadership, management and governance arrangements.

Findings

Children’s services were able to demonstrate significant improvement in a number of key areas with other areas still requiring further work.

Staff morale is high and there is passion and commitment at all levels to continuing to work hard on the journey of improvement to deliver excellent services for children.

Safeguarding responses are mostly timely and proportionate, but there is room for improvement in collation and recording of evidence and analysis of risk. 

There is strong leadership and governance in children’s services. Members of the council were able to demonstrate their contribution to children’s services improvement journey. Senior officers are visible, available and driving improvements.

Areas for development

• Evidence collection, recording and analysis must be brought up to a consistently high level to ensure cases where children are suffering significant harm are not allowed to drift.
• Continue to increase the number and range of placements options for children on the island, based on professional understanding of children‘s needs.
• Children need to be able to build relationships with social workers they can trust, with the number of social workers to which each child has to repeat their story minimised. Social workers must ensure every interaction with a child counts and be able to evidence their work.

Next steps

We expect the local authority to consider the areas for development and incorporate them into their development plans. We will monitor progress through our on-going engagement activity with the local authority.