Young people

Hertfordshire's inspection results: a summary for children and young people

In early 2007 a team of inspectors visited our county to check that we're providing a good service to local children and young people. Here’s a round-up of what they told us...

The inspectors did a lot of work to find out what life is like for children and young people in Hertfordshire. They spoke to many different people, including children, young people, parents, teachers and social workers. They read loads of reports. And they made lots of visits.

Once they had finished all this research, the inspectors sat down together and thought about the services we provide to children and young people and how to make them better. They came up with many ideas, including the ones shown below. These are some of the things that need doing straight away.

• Safeguarding - sometimes children and young people need expert help to overcome their problems. When that happens, we need to be able to provide help more quickly. We also need to remember how important it is to keep children and young people safe at all times, and although we check our staff and volunteers very carefully indeed we have to get better at making sure these checks are always done as well as they can be.
• Looked-after children - although things are getting better all the time, the children and young people who are looked after by the council told the inspectors that they don’t always get the help and support they need. We’re grateful to know about this problem and will do our best to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future.
• Children with a learning difficulty and/or disability – we were pleased to hear from the inspectors that most of the children with a learning difficulty and/or disability who spoke to the inspectors are doing well at school. But we need to do more to make sure that we help them to keep healthy. And we must give them support whenever they need extra care.
• Black and minority ethnic children - from around the age of 14, some black and minority ethnic children don’t do as well as expected at school. We need to find out why this is happening and how we can help them to get better results.
• Bullying - we’re going to do some investigations to find out how much bullying is going on in our schools. Stamping out bullying is one of our top priorities, so we’re going to act quickly on this.

We’d like to thank everyone who spoke to the team of inspectors. Your views are really important to us, so we’re going to keep asking children and young people for feedback about our services and for ideas about how we can improve them.

We hope you find this summary useful. If you would like to read the full inspection report, you can find it on the Ofsted website at www.ofsted.gov.uk.


If you would like help or information about any of these issues, the following may help.

www.bullying.co.uk
www.childline.org.uk
www.incareinfo.org.uk
www.hertsdirect.org/hand