Do performance indictors predict Ofsted ratings? An exploratory study of children’s services in England

Wilkins, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2780-0385 and Antonopoulou, Vivi 2020. Do performance indictors predict Ofsted ratings? An exploratory study of children’s services in England. Journal of Children's Services 15 (2) , pp. 45-59. 10.1108/JCS-07-2019-0035

Preview

PDF - Accepted Post-Print Version Download (448kB) | Preview

Abstract

Children’s Services in England are inspected by Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills). Each local authority is given a singular overall rating – outstanding, good, requirements improvement or inadequate. These ratings carry immense significance. Persistently inadequate authorities are liable to have legal responsibility for providing services outsourced to another organisation. It used to be said that Ofsted focused too much on procedural compliance and previous research has found that deprivation and spending were significantly associated with Ofsted ratings. More recently, Ofsted has introduced a new inspection framework, through which they aim to put the experiences of children at the heart of their approach. We report an analysis of forty-five variables in relation to children in need, children in care and young adults with care experience. We considered whether Ofsted inspection results were associated with reliably good or poor performance in relation to these variables. In our statistical analyses, we found no consistent patterns of difference between authorities in relation to their Ofsted rating and deprivation was the best predictor.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE)
Publisher:	Emerald
ISSN:	1746-6660
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 May 2020
Date of Acceptance:	22 May 2020
Last Modified:	06 Dec 2024 10:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/131921

Citation Data

Cited 1 time in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item