Many thanks for your positive feedback re Outsourcing analysis – here’s more.

Many thanks to everyone who has been in contact regarding our blog and analysis 2 Key Sentences from Research re Outsourcing and Children’s Social Care – NCERCC

Everyone agreed with the 2 key sentences

• The severe shortage of appropriate and available children’s social care placements is detrimental to the placement process for children in care.
• Designing commissioning practices that facilitate local, stable, and high-quality care should be a policy and research priority going forward.

The blog and document are enabling people to rethink their perception of the study, and the idea of difference when thinking of the sector.

For example, one is relooking at the numbers of moves before placement having been assisted to realise the factors involved in comparative stability outcomes. Their conclusion was they needed their proposed LA homes to be for specific needs planned from an audit, they realised they only had plans for generic homes.

There was a request for more reflective thinking by NCERCC of publications. 

In future blogs and docs we will be providing reflections on research, reports or commentary. Those getting in contact said they did not feel there was enough available ‘out there’ for informed reflection that enables scrutiny and accountability.

Being clear about 2 aspects of the blog and analysis

We think our piece says

• The variance in the quality of inspection outcomes between for-profit and other provision types is within parameters of statistical tolerance for variation. 

Ofsted methodology is applied to all inspections in pursuit of consistency. However, given that each inspection is a unique set of circumstances and given inspector interpretation it is understood there is an inevitable degree of variability.

• There is no account taken of needs.

The point we wanted to get into the discourse is that difference, in order to be understood, needs to be contextualised. 

In future blogs and docs we will be looking reflectively at research, reports or commentary and how this is taken in by its readers.

What we think we see (all of us/anyone) is not ever actual reality. 

We need to reflect on the observations.

When we read reports, stats, research it is likely these will contribute to a view of ‘the way things are’. It’s necessary to also include the context and the potential purpose of those commissioning the study.

We need to reflect on ourselves.

• How has our view of the world been derived from our previous reading and experience?
• In reading a report, stat, research do we reflect on its impact – is it challenging or affirming our professional identity, self-esteem and self-confidence?

Research, stats, reports, are important providing insights and a way of seeing things we didn’t see before. We need to adopt a stance that enables us to reflect upon our agreement or alternative. Our reflections need addressing repeatedly in public. Our individual reading and conclusions need testing. Knowledge accrues incrementally and is more robust the more it is tested.

The importance of this and how we may do it will require, taking the words of Jurgen Habermas, ‘a structural transformation of the public sphere’. Such a development in children’s services would be entirely consistent with good child care theory (secure emotional base).  More on this in the next blog.