Corporate Dad

And now for the good news. Quality Protects, the government's programme aimed at "transforming" services for children, is starting to deliver. That's the official verdict of a national overview report published today, based on returns from all 150 English social services authorities.

John Hutton, social care minister, writes in a foreword to the report that "significant improvements" have been made over the past year in areas such as collection and use of management information. "And there is evidence that this is beginning to translate into improved experiences and outcomes for children."

Progress, however, is relative. Today's report comes hard on the heels of findings by the government's social services inspectorate (SSI) that children from ethnic minorities are failing to get services that meet their needs. Of a sample eight authorities inspected, only one had "taken race equality issues seriously".

The answer to this apparent para dox, it seems, is that authorities are heading in the right direction but that, in many places, this is manifest in terms of process rather than practice. As Diana Robbins, author of the Quality Protects (QP) report, puts it: "The year two evaluation of QP has been described as producing a mountain of paper. But the top of the mountain provides the clearest possible view of councils moving, with their partners, towards providing better services for children and their families."

Though the evaluation is the second of its kind, it covers the first year of QP funding through the children's services grant worth ?375m over three years. All 150 returns, known as management action plans (Maps), have been approved - qualifying the authorities for their share of next year's funding - and eight singled out as being of particularly high quality: Blackpool, Manchester, Portsmouth, Stockton-on-Tees, Suffolk, Tameside in Greater Manchester and Wandsworth and Westminster in London. Each of the eight achieved an overall "very good" rating of three on a four-point scale.

At Blackpool, QP co-ordinator Sue White says having to address the agenda has given the authority an opportunity to go back to basics and take a hard look at children's services across the board. As a new, unitary council created in 1998, it had the distinct advantage of no "history", but the disadvantage of having lost a lot of key staff who had stayed with Lancashire. It also had the special challenge of a transient population including many vulnerable families.

"We started off with a clean slate and we set out to work together from day one," says White. "The key thing was that we had an assistant director for children's services, Daphne Sanders, who had a clear vision of how we should deliver QP and everybody bought into that vision. It's had an effect on every aspect of children's services and led into other areas of the department as well."

Blackpool is praised in the report for staging a strategy conference to draw everybody into the QP process. Implementation has included greatly improving the council's own children's homes; boosting recruitment and quality control of foster carers, while introducing a fostering payment scheme; and applying fresh approaches to adoption, services for disabled children and use of private sector placements.

Overall, the report, Tracking Progress in Children's Services, finds "huge" improvement in authorities' capacity to monitor and report performance on children's services. This, among other things, means that the report can make the first national estimate of the number of young people receiving services under the Children Act - 330,000. The report also notes marked progress in involving children themselves in the design, delivery and evaluation of services, and in the involvement of councillors in strategic thinking and governance.

The indifference to children's services shown by many councillors came as a shock to officials and ministers involved in the planning of QP. A series of seminars has been staged to tackle this, but an unpublished survey for the Department of Health by research group Mori is believed to show that a huge impact was made by a letter to councils from Frank Dobson, when he was health secretary, reminding elected members in no uncertain terms of their responsibilities as corporate parents of children in care.

On the down side, the report finds less progress in involving children in decisions about their own care. Only a quarter of councils are said to be making good ground in this area. Robbins, an independent consultant, warns that "until an approach to looked after children based on partnership with them becomes more entrenched in the day-to-day practice of social work with children, the most earnest aspirations set by councils could be subverted by non-compliance or, more simply, by reliance on traditional methods".

Disappointment is also expressed at the "slippage" in QP programmes, amounting to almost 4% of budgeted expenditure in 1999-2000. A key fac tor in this was the trouble experienced by authorities in recruiting staff: the report comments on "the difficulty experienced everywhere in finding the right people to fill all the new posts which QP plans required".

Summing up, Robbins concludes: "Progress is real, and in the most advanced councils this progress is being seen and measured." She admits, however, that many achievements remain concerned with process, rather than demonstrable improvement in children's lives. "Few councils have yet reached the point of both being able to identify, implement and monitor a strategy for change, and then demonstrate the effect of that change in terms of outcomes."

So the SSI, inspecting services for ethnic minority children between April and November last year, found that most authorities were still not well placed to deliver care and support appropriate to their needs. While councils did have anti-racist and equal opportunities policies and strategies, there was "little evidence" of their implementation. "Many authorities," says the inspection report, "talked about 'mainstreaming' the issues, but in practice this often meant that they were ignored".

The report, Excellence Not Excuses, looks at services in Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire, Liverpool, Sheffield, Wolverhampton and three authorities in London - Islington, Southwark and Hammersmith and Fulham. It says that "in some instances, the safety of ethnic minority children was being compromised because physical and sexual abuse had not been identified and properly dealt with as a child protection issue".

Hutton is warning that, in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the subsequent Macpherson report, the government expects authorities to be acutely sensitive to the challenges of meeting the needs of ethnic minority children and families. "This report has flagged up some very serious issues that must be addressed," he says. "We need to see real improvement in services in these areas."