Exploring the impact of Ofsted inspections on performance in children’s social care

Rick Hood and Allie Goldacre

Children and Youth Services Review, 2021, vol. 129, issue C

Abstract: Children’s social care services in England are inspected by a government agency, Ofsted. This paper reports on the impact of Ofsted inspections on rates of intervention and other performance measures, such as expenditure and workforce, drawing on a quantitative analysis of national datasets. Annual published returns from 150 English local authorities from 2009 to 19 were combined with results from Ofsted inspections under the Single Inspection Framework (2014–17), which covered all local authorities. Interrupted time series (ITS) analysis was undertaken to find out whether an inspection had a significant effect on performance in the context of trends pre- and post-inspection, and whether this effect varied according to the type of judgement. The results showed discontinuities in a range of indicators in the year of an inspection and the year afterwards. An increase in rates of child protection interventions occurred at the time of an inspection, which was most pronounced in local authorities receiving an inadequate judgement. An inadequate judgement led to a steep rise in spending and use of agency workers compared to other local authorities. The findings suggest that a short-term spike in intervention rates is an unintended consequence of inspections, which is sustained only in local authorities judged to be performing badly. Implications are discussed for performance in the sector and the purpose of inspection.

Keywords: Children’s social care; Child welfare; Ofsted; Inspection; Performance measures; Quantitative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740921002644
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:129:y:2021:i:c:s0190740921002644

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2021.106188

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().