Children: Social Services

(asked on 27th February 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support his Department provided to the children's social services department at Kingston upon Hull City Council (a) during the period that those services were graded by Ofsted as requires improvement, (b) since those services were graded by Ofsted as inadequate in January 2019 and (c) since the monitoring visit by Ofsted on 14 January 2020.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 5th March 2020

Over the course of 2018, the Director of Children’s Services and the Assistant Director for Hull City Council met with the regional lead for Yorkshire and the Humber on several occasions to discuss support. During this time, Hull City Council was in receipt of support from North Yorkshire County Council as a Partner in Practice (PiP), funded by the Department for Education. In February 2019, Hull City Council had also paid for support from another PiP, Essex County Council.

In May 2019, the Department issued an improvement notice and appointed an improvement adviser, Paul Moffat, to support and challenge Hull City Council’s improvement journey in line with established policy set out in the ‘Putting Children First’ guidance, which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/putting-children-first-our-vision-for-childrens-social-care.

Mr Moffat was previously the Chief Executive of Doncaster Children’s Services Trust. He has a strong background in improving children’s services, taking Doncaster’s Children’s Services Trust’s Ofsted rating from ‘Inadequate’ to ‘Good’ in three years. The Department also funded North Yorkshire County Council and Essex County Council in 2019 to provide support to Hull City Council on a number of areas.

Since the monitoring visit in January 2020, Mr Moffat has continued to work closely with Hull City Council.

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