Councillors could “shadow” social workers in South Gloucestershire to check children’s services are improving following a damning report.

The local authority’s social care services for children were judged “inadequate” by Ofsted in 2016.

Since then, the watchdog has made seven checks on the statutory services, and found they were still in need of “significant improvement” four months ago.

Sonya Miller, the outgoing head of children’s services at South Gloucestershire Council, told a scrutiny commission last week those services should have reached a “good” standard by the end of next year.

Ms Miller told the councillors who sit on the commission her team had developed a “suite of meaningful [performance] measures” to track progress against the department’s improvement plan and some gains were already being made.

But commission chair Ian Boulton asked for more information than was available in a 28-page report about the improvement plan.

Cllr Boulton said the report describing what children’s services were doing to meet Ofsted’s requirements seemed “quite high level”.

“For me, it’s about trying to get beyond what we’re being told and trying to find out what’s going on below that,” he said. “We have to do our jobs as scrutineers and do that studying and hold the department to task.”

He suggested that, as well as getting more detailed information, scrutiny commission members could “shadow” social workers to reassure themselves the necessary improvements were being made.

Ms Miller said she could certainly provide more “granular detail” about specific subjects and any of her team would welcome any visits from councillors, provided they were given sufficient notice.

Cllr Boulton said: “That’s not something we’ve done in the past, but actually shadowing some of the work that’s being done on the ground is something that we could be doing.

“We have to satisfy ourselves that we are scrutinising properly.”

The report from Ofsted’s final monitoring inspection, published in May, found the children’s services “requires improvement to be good”. 

It listed 13 areas requiring improvement, including the speed of decision-making when contact is first made with a child, how quickly preventative measures are put in place for children who are referred to the service, and how well care leavers are prepared for living independently.

Lead inspector Emmy Tomsett wrote: “Recently accelerated progress against the improvement plan has ensured that outcomes for most children are now improving in most areas of the service, but not all recommendations from the inspection in 2016 have been fully addressed.”