Children’s home is ‘inadequate’

MAJOR safeguarding failures at a Portsmouth City Council children’s home with staff ‘reluctant’ to intervene in incidents have seen Ofsted rate it as ‘inadequate’.

The education watchdog gave the home its lowest rating after an April inspection found children were being placed ‘at risk of harm’ due to poor practices.

Inspectors found that concerns had not been properly investigated, despite ‘positive relationships’ between staff, children and parents.

‘Poor safeguarding practice was a contributory factor to children suffering harm,’ the report by Jennie Christopher says.

‘Staff missed opportunities to prevent harm from happening and reoccurring.

‘They did not accurately assess the potential risks that children might pose to each other and the supervision arrangements in place for children did not provide sufficient protection.’

The report says that there were ‘at least two occasions’ where children from outside the home in question stayed undetected overnight in the room of a child deemed to be at risk of exploitation.

‘Staff did not act to prevent this, even though there was reasonable cause to suspect that there was a risk,’ the report adds.

‘The lack of supervision of children and the low levels of professional curiosity mean that some children have not been kept safe.’

In another case, a child who was not allowed access to a mobile phone was ‘easily able’ to take one from a staff member and had also taken the phone of a younger child more than once.

The home was rated ‘inadequate’ in each of the assessed areas, which included how well children are protected and the effectiveness of its leadership due to these safeguarding ‘failures’.

Sarah Daly, Portsmouth City Council’s director of children, families and education, said that measures have already been introduced in a bid to improve the home.

‘We are extremely disappointed that one of our children’s homes was recently judged as inadequate by Ofsted,’ she said.

‘As soon as we were told of the provisional inadequate judgement we took immediate action and put an improvement plan in place to address the issues identified.

‘We hope that when the home is reinspected Ofsted will agree that changes have been made to prevent similar issues ever happening again.’