Ofsted and their willful ignorance
FAC’s plea to Ofsted during the June 2025 inspection to listen to the public’s concerns about Herefordshire Children’s Services went unheard. The latest inspection report is a testimony to Ofsted’s willful ignorance.
FAC Letter to Ofsted ref Herefordshire Council, 16 June 2025
Dear Ofsted
Families’ Alliance for Change (Herefordshire) FAC is a group which formed in summer 2024 in response to widespread concern that two years after the damning Ofsted inspection in July 2022 Children’s Services in Herefordshire were still not fit for purpose.
Now, in June 2025, we are still aware of systemic risks within Children’s Services which result in children and families being repeatedly traumatised in numerous different ways.
FAC comprises professionals including representatives from social care, current and former teachers, company directors, former civil servants, and current and former local politicians including county, town and parish councillors.
Herefordshire Council has failed to win back trust in its Children’s Services, and we hope that our points below will help you to understand some of the reasons why this might be the case. As you undertake your inspection of children in care services, we wish to alert you to some of our key concerns under some broad themes.
1. Herefordshire Council is still not listening to local people including parents, professionals and politicians who are raising concerns about poor practice and malpractice which harm children.
(i) Please investigate how many concerns had to be raised about social worker Nicola Hall, before managers in Children’s Services took the public’s concerns seriously. We would draw your attention in particular to the case of one father, XXXXXX, whose children were unnecessarily removed from his care and were not returned to his care for over a year even after the Court ordered their return to him. His children are traumatised by being told by Nicola Hall that they would never be returning home, even though the Family Court had ordered their return. There are other examples on her case list where Nicola Hall has perpetuated separation between a child and its family long after false accusations against the family have been exposed, including as the result of the work of the Families Commission in 2023. We can supply names of families to you.
(ii) There is now a parents group run by the Service Director Safeguarding and Family Support, Rachel Gillott, called Families for Change. The membership of the group is tightly controlled by Rachel Gillott as is the agenda, which is described by parents who have attended as “inflexible”. Some describe the meetings as a “tick box exercise”, other have called it “performative” and “pre-scripted” rather than a genuine attempt to listen and to understand families’ experiences. One parent described the environment in the meeting as leaving her, “feeling silenced or emotionally dismissed”. There was general agreement that there was “a lack of empathy” from staff in the meetings. One described it like this: “The ‘families for change’ groups could often get emotional as parents relived trauma. The council staff had no empathy. As parents became tearful and distraught the staff often just looked on like it was unprofessional.” There is a sense among some of the parents invited to attend that it would count against them if they did not attend. “Some parents felt compelled to attend to be seen as “on side” and this counted towards getting kids back and getting an easier ride from this council.”
This forum is doing some useful work but is not getting to the root causes of ongoing failure. Parents shared the following thoughts: “At no point did it feel that these root causes were being meaningfully acknowledged, let alone addressed” and this from another parent: “Without admitting the real detail of the horrors of the past the group can’t succeed. Like trying to rationalise a massive overdraft without admitting the madness that got you into debt. Without total honesty and admissions we will see only slow limited change.”
Rachel Gillott has been invited to a FAC meeting but has so far declined to attend. We sense that senior officers are not yet ready to come to terms with some of the fundamental problems which are at the heart of chronic failure.
2. Truth twisting is alive and well at Herefordshire Council. The Council’s first priority is still not to protect children and families; it prioritises protecting the reputation of the Council and its officers above all else. This leads repeatedly to “truth twisting”, some of which appears careless and some of which is clearly deliberate. We have numerous examples to share with you of blatant untruths being trotted out in correspondence and case files. Some parents even have examples of significant and demonstrable factual inaccuracies in current court papers.
(i) Sadly, this truth twisting starts at the top of the tree with the Director of Governance and Legal Services, Claire Porter. Sam Pratley, who resigned from the Children and Young Person Scrutiny Committee, made a complaint about the misinformation shared with him by Claire Porter in relation to a child protection case. The answer she gave him in writing to the concerns he raised sought to hide from him the fact that in the case he was raising the police had made a MASH referral and had referred the children at risk to the Protecting Vulnerable Persons Unit. When Sam Pratley made a formal complaint about the misleading response from Claire Porter, the Complaints Department refused to investigate his concerns due to the seniority of the officer.
In a Council where the truth matters, the Chief Executive, Paul Walker, should be immediately investigating any hint of dishonesty from any of his staff, in particular any hint that the head of legal services may be deliberately obscuring the truth. As you may know, Sam Pratley is one of three members of the Children and Young Person Scrutiny Committee to resign in the last year.
(ii) When parents identify factual inaccuracies in their case files, false information which is being shared with other authorities and influencing decisions about their case, they cannot get their files changed. Take, for example, the case of XXXXX. Two years ago the Council admitted maladministration in her case and admitted to causing her secondary abuse by perpetuating lies told about her. Two years on and hours of correspondence later, her case files are yet to be changed and the lies are still influencing decisions being made in this case.
We can also provide you with written evidence of Tina Russell’s lack of concern that the Council was about to present to court a document which contained factual inaccuracies. The parent in this case asked for a case conference to establish the facts of the case so that on the basis of agreed facts a decision could be made in the best interests of the children. This request was denied by Tina Russell and the false information has now been submitted to court. Again we can supply the name of the case.
(iii) The complaints team is not independent of legal services. The complaints system should be acting as a valuable early warning system for the Improvement Team to identify poor practice but instead complaints are swiftly shut down and the findings in complaints are often brutally dishonest. We can provide evidence of a reply from the Complaints Team to the Rt Hon Jesse Norman MP who wrote on behalf of a constituent who had not had an answer for months to a complaint about a serious child protection concern. We can evidence that the answer sent to Jesse Norman is a blatant lie. The concern raised in the complaint about a child protection issue remains unanswered to this day.
3. The number of children in care remains alarmingly high. This has been the case now for the two years since the Ofsted inspection in July 2022. While some progress has been made in returning children to birth families, which is welcomed, delays are continuing to cause immense suffering to children and families.
We are also alarmed by the number of S.47 inquiries which are launched. We have raised concerns over misleading guidance produced by the Herefordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership which may be one of the reasons why so many S.47 inquiries are started. A formal complaint has been submitted about the faulty advice in the Right Help Right Time document, but the complaint is yet to receive a substantive answer. For further information on this please read this blog on the FAC website: Parents under suspicion: why so many in Herefordshire?
Our plea to Ofsted
It is not just FAC (Herefordshire) who are concerned that the truth is not always being told; three members of the Children and Young People Scrutiny committee have resigned because they are so concerned by the lack of transparency from officers.
We therefore urge you during your inspection to triangulate “assurances” being offered to you by officers at Herefordshire Council by cross-checking the information received from officers with information from parties outside of the Council. We have indicated where we have information that may be useful to your inspection and we hope you will offer us a chance to share that information with you in some way.
Until the root causes of ongoing failure are addressed, all of our friends and families living in Herefordshire with children are at risk of harm. This extract from a blog on our website shows how vulnerable many feel.
In all the soul searching since Ofsted judged Herefordshire Children’s Services inadequate in all areas, there has never been any suggestion that it is the parents of Herefordshire to blame for the sky-high rates of children in care. The parents of Herefordshire are no better or worse than the parents in any other county, but we have lost our children on an industrial scale.
Until I met families in Herefordshire directly affected by the egregious inadequacy of Herefordshire Children’s Services, I would have assumed that children might only be removed if the parents were alcoholics, drug addicts, violent, neglectful or abusive. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that children might be removed from their mothers as a consequence of neurodiversity, post-natal depression, an accident, a genetic disease or a mother leaving a violent partner.
All the mothers I know who have had children removed from them are decent, capable, hard-working women. Many encountered the authorities at a moment of crisis which could affect any of us, only to face an onslaught of vilification and the removal of their children.
We wish you well with your inspection.
FAC (Herefordshire)