Official Statistics

Methodology report: Local authority inspection outcomes as at 31 March 2024

Published 30 August 2024

Applies to England

The local authority inspection outcomes as at 31 March 2024 release includes:

• main findings

• underlying data

• methodology report

• pre-release access list

Introduction

This document contains quality and methodology information relevant to our official statistics release of local authority (LA) inspections outcomes, which we publish once a year.

In England, 153 LAs are responsible for ensuring and overseeing the effective delivery of social care services for children who need help and protection, children in care and care leavers. We inspect LA children’s services under section 136(2) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. We carry out these inspections under the inspections of local authority children’s services (ILACS) framework.

This official statistics release reports on the outcomes of the LA children’s services inspections that we carried out within the most recent reporting period. It also includes the details of all 153 LAs in England, with their most recent inspection outcome, where available.

Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR).

OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.

You are welcome to contact us directly on socialcareSAO@ofsted.gov.uk with any comments about how we meet these standards. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or through the OSR website.

Applying the code of practice

This section is broken down by the 3 pillars of the code of practice for official statistics:

• trustworthiness

• quality

• value

Trustworthiness

Timeliness and punctuality

This data is currently published once a year, on the date pre-announced in the publication schedule. This schedule also provides information on any delay in publication.

This publication includes details of inspections that have taken place by 31 March, with a report published by 30 June of the same year. The cut-off period for including published inspection reports in the statistics was set to 3 calendar months to allow time for all the relevant reports to have been published.

The average production time for this official statistics release is approximately 6 weeks. This time includes extracting, cleaning and analysing the data, drafting findings, quality assuring all outputs, securing internal sign-off and uploading the information to GOV.UK.

We announce publication of the statistics on our social media channels on the day of publication. We give pre-release access in accordance with the Pre-release to Official Statistics Order (2008). You can find the list of postholders granted pre-release access as a separate document accompanying each release.

Confidentiality, transparency and security

Where we hold sensitive or personal data, the disclosure control processes we have in place ensure that this data is not published. All data releases follow Ofsted’s confidentiality and revisions policies. All staff using sensitive data have been trained in confidentiality and disclosure awareness.

Quality

Accuracy and reliability

Information on inspection outcomes is extracted directly from our administrative systems. Although we aim to produce the highest-quality statistics, there are occasional differences between the data on the administrative system and the final inspection report. Reasons for this include changes being made during the quality assurance process for the reports.

As part of the production of this publication, we perform rigorous quality assurance checks, including checking a sample of entries to ensure that the data on the administrative system matches the inspection reports. All individual inspection reports are published and available to the public, which offers an additional level of transparency and assurance.

More than one analyst is involved in producing and analysing the data, and quality assurance is always carried out by a different team member to the person who produced the work. We carry out quality checks on the SQL code used to export data, all processing and calculations, the release template, the combined dataset, the analysis and the main findings. All outputs are reviewed and subject to a sign-off process to ensure suitability for publication.

We publish revisions to the data (adding the outcomes of any inspection reports published after the original cut-off date) in line with our revisions policy for official statistics.

Technical production

The technical production of the official statistics publication may also result in manual errors. We use a rigorous procedure for assuring data quality, with the aim of minimising the risk of reporting errors. If an error is discovered in the document, we place a note on the website and upload a corrected version of the document as soon as possible.

Read more information on issues relating to the use of administrative data.

Coherence and comparability

From January 2023, the ILACS framework included a separate judgement on the experiences and progress of care leavers. This area was previously evaluated as part of the judgement ‘experiences and progress of children in care and care leavers’ and was separated following a consultation in summer 2022.

Due to recent structural changes, some LAs might not yet have received an inspection or might not have an inspection history. The most recent structural changes were the following:

• From 1 April 2019, the LAs Bournemouth and Poole combined into a single LA named ‘Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole’; Dorset had a change of boundaries following the removal of Christchurch

• From 1 April 2021, the single LA Northamptonshire was split into 2 separate LAs: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire

• From 1 April 2023, the single LA of Cumbria was split into 2 separate LAs: Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness

Please note that inspection outcomes for local authority children’s services were previously included in the publication ‘Children’s social care data in England’. From August 2024, we have published LA inspection outcomes as a separate release, focusing on inspections that took place after the introduction of the ILACS framework in 2018.

Data on historic inspections are still available in our Children’s social care statistics collection page.

Other sources of similar data

No comparable data is published by other organisations that produce official statistics for inspections of LA children’s services in England.

Several third parties provide datasets and tools that display publicly available Ofsted inspection judgements. Some of these may be collated using web scraping to extract inspection outcomes from published inspection reports. We cannot comment on the quality of these datasets.

For the devolved nations, inspections are carried out and reviews and reports published by the following:

• the Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW)

• the Care Inspectorate in Scotland

• the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland

Value

Relevance

Ofsted regulates and inspects to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages.

We inspect LA children’s services under section 136(2) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. For more information on how we inspect LA children’s services, please see our ILACS framework. You can find individual inspection reports on the Ofsted reports website.

The underlying data and main findings included in this release:

• allow Ofsted to meet our legal obligations

• provide an accurate picture of the quality of LA children’s services and help identify areas of weak performance, which may also influence policy decisions

• provide media outlets with key findings to inform the public about the quality of children’s services around the country and in local areas

• allow users, including analysts and researchers, to manipulate and interpret the published data for their own purposes

• inform our own review and development of inspection frameworks and policies

• inform discussions and decisions among stakeholder groups (including LAs), academics and other interested parties across the sector

• contribute towards the findings in HMCI’s Annual Report to Parliament

Accessibility

We publish our releases in an accessible format on GOV.UK. The information is publicly available, and there are no restrictions on access to the published data. The underlying data file published as part of this release meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 accessibility requirements, as recommended in the GSS guidance on releasing statistics in spreadsheets.

Providing underlying data allows users to perform their own analysis. Users may use and reuse this information (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Performance, cost and burden on respondents

The data included in the release is generated by our inspection process and is therefore administrative data. There is no burden on respondents in relation to this statistics release because data is a by-product of Ofsted’s inspection process. The only cost is the internal resource involved in collating the release.

Assessment of users’ needs and perceptions

We regularly review Ofsted’s official statistics to ensure that they meet users’ needs. This has included running public consultations in the last few years.

In November 2021, we began a review of our suite of statistical publications. We carried out a 10-week investigation to understand more about our production processes, and internal and external users’ needs. This was so that we could make evidence-based decisions on how to improve our statistical publications and how to provide more value for the same amount of effort. We have published the report covering this review.

We include the contact details for the social care inspection insight team in the release and we encourage users to give us feedback about any unmet needs or improvements that we can make.

Methodology

Information on inspection outcomes is extracted directly from our administrative systems and is aggregated using SQL. The code used is reviewed and revised regularly.

This release reflects the situation as at 31 March. Therefore, it does not include any inspections that took place after this date. The production cut-off period for including published inspection reports in this release is 3 calendar months after the end of the reporting period. Inspections that took place before 31 March but did not have a report published by 30 June will be included in the next release.

We aggregate inspection data in 3 different datasets, which constitute the underlying data published as part of this release:

• Inspections as at 31 March: this is a list of all the LAs in England, with their most recent inspection judgements and sub-judgements

• In-year inspections: this is a list of all short and standard inspections, monitoring visits and focused visits that have taken place within the last year (between 1 April and 31 March) under the ILACS framework

• ILACS inspection history: this is a list of all the LAs in England with all their short and standard inspections from 2018, when the ILACS framework was introduced. A separate table at the bottom of the page shows ILACS inspections of LAs that no longer exist following a restructure

The main findings of this release are based on the analysis of the underlying data.

Glossary

Definitions of terms are in the statistical glossary.