Ealing Council has been urged to strengthen its strategy for supporting kinship carers, individuals who provide care for children unable to live with their parents but with whom they have a family connection. The recommendation came from the Children's Services Scrutiny Panel at its meeting on Tuesday, 8 July 2025, where members reviewed the Children's Social Care Self-Evaluation 2024/25 and discussed progress following an Ofsted inspection of children's services. The overall effectiveness judgement of the 2024 Ofsted inspection for Ealing Children's Services was 'Good'.
The scrutiny panel reviewed the Children's Social Care Self-Evaluation 2024/25, which assesses the quality and impact of practices within the council's Children's Services. The self-evaluation considers performance from April 2024 to March 2026 and reflects feedback from children, young people, families, staff, and partners, as well as qualitative performance reports, intelligence from quality assurance activity, and the 2024 Ofsted inspection.
Strategic priorities for 2025/26 include:
- Re-organising the social care service and implementing the new Early Help approach.
- Further strengthening the workforce.
- Maintaining strong partnership arrangements.
- Building on the borough's strong educational outcomes.
- Building on the Connected Communities Vision.
- Continuing local and sub-regional work on addressing placement sufficiency.
- Building on improvements in ensuring consistently effective practice.
- Consistently gathering feedback from children, young people, and families.
- Strengthening and continuing to build upon co-production activities.
The self-evaluation also identified areas for development, including continuing to attract and recruit foster carers. To address this, Ealing Council plans to enhance their offer to carers, including uplifts to fostering fees, full Council Tax exemptions while children are placed, free borough-wide parking for carers living within the borough, and free garden waste collections. They are also pooling resources through a West London Fostering Hub and using AI for targeted marketing. The council has a target to approve 8 full time carer households in 2025/26 and onboard 15 respite carers through a partnership. The self-evaluation also highlighted the need for working with children and young people to support them into education, employment, or training, and increasing the use of Family Group Conferences at the early stage of the service.
The meeting also included an update on the progress of children's services following the publication of the Ofsted inspection report in July 2024. The report focused on the area of 'Help and Protection', which was graded as 'Requires Improvement to be Good'.
Key findings of the 2024 Ofsted inspection beyond the 'Requires Improvement to be Good' rating for 'Help and Protection' were:
- 'The impact of leaders on social work practice with children and families' was graded as Good.
- 'The experiences and progress of children in care' was graded as Good.
- 'The experiences and progress of care leavers' was graded as Good.
Specific areas identified as needing improvement within 'Help and Protection' were:
- The consistent identification of risk and effective, timely responses, including strategy meetings, when there are concerns about children's safety.
- The quality of multi-agency planning to improve safety and reduce risks for children who go missing from care and are vulnerable to exploitation.
- The pace and impact of activity to increase fostering capacity and improve placement options for children who need care.
- The quality and impact of management oversight of initial decision-making for children placed in kinship and family placements.
- Support for young carers.
Actions taken to address recommendations from the inspection include strengthening responses to immediate safeguarding issues, providing training and guidance to managers, and updating the multi-agency threshold of need guidance.
Progress was also highlighted in several areas, including stabilisation of caseloads in the long-term safeguarding service, reduction in the number of children in care, improved timeliness of child and family assessments, and improving responses to missing children.
Next steps include reconfiguring the social care service to establish the Assessment and Intervention Pilot permanently, and planning for the implementation of the Families First Partnership Programme (FFPP), which requires local authorities to deliver locality-based, multi-disciplinary services to children and families.
