Inspecting the inspectors

By Sue Littlemore
BBC social affairs correspondent

Ms Gilbert said Ofsted was planning changes to its inspection routine

Why did the chief inspector for children's services in England, Christine Gilbert, face a stream of uncomfortable questions about the standard of child protection inspections?

The answer is that, although at the beginning of this month, the findings of an emergency inspection of Haringey's child protection service were "devastating", according to Children's Secretary Ed Balls; the two most recent routine inspections into Haringey dubbed the same service as "adequate" and "good".

So when the chief inspector appeared before a committee of MPs, whose job is to keep an eye on children's services, they wanted to know how it was that her inspection service got it so wrong?

Over two hours of questioning, Christine Gilbert tried to construct a defence.

The first inspection in question took place in 2006. Inspectors were sent into Haringey to make their assessments and concluded that although there were some problems with a shortage of social workers in Haringey and with the speed in which children's cases were picked up, they judged child protection in Haringey to be "adequate".

The second inspection took place in 2007 and was a paper exercise where inspectors largely based their judgment that things had improved and were now "good" on information and figures provided by Haringey.

'Misleading data'

Christine Gilbert told MPs she stood by the 2006 inspection; however she admitted the 2007 inspection was misleading because, she argued, her inspectors had themselves been misled by Haringey's data.

She gave one example that the number of cases on file were listed in terms of the number of families a social worker was dealing with rather than the numbers of individual children they were responsible for protecting. Consequently case loads on individual social workers looked smaller than they actually were.

Baby P died shortly before Ofsted gave Haringey a clean bill of health

But isn't this just the sort of failure to get to the facts of a situation that Christine Gilbert is accusing Haringey of now after the death of Baby P?

That sentiment was surely in the mind of the chairman of the committee, Barry Sheerman, as he pursued the chief inspector with questions that would surely have been in the minds of any onlooker.

"When inspectors discovered from the data that almost 50% of social workers in Haringey were agency staff - didn't that ring alarm bells?" he asked

"That's not uncommon across London," Ms Gilbert replied.

When asked how widespread she thought misinformation to inspectors was, she said she didn't know, but was writing to all chief executives of councils in England saying she expected them to vouch for the data their managers provided.

Ms Gilbert told the committee plans had already been announced to reform and enhance the inspection of child protection.

I don't think Christine Gilbert is aware of the public disquiet about the death of Baby P and need for Ofsted to put that to an end

Barry Sheerman MP

But, Barry Sheerman suggested a better inspection system might even have saved Baby P's life.

Towards the end of her interrogation, he proposed that public concern for child protection had reached such a height, Christine Gilbert should consider allocating one of her inspectors to each of England's 150 authorities to keep children's services under constant scrutiny.

Appearing to be uninspired by this suggestion, the chief inspector said the legislation for that didn't exist.

As Mr Sheerman left the committee room he spoke to journalists: "This session has made me less confident rather than more that in 150 local authorities, there isn't another Haringey waiting to happen.

"I don't think Christine Gilbert is aware of the public disquiet about the death of Baby P and need for Ofsted to put that to an end."