Martyn Oliver's speech at the 2025 National Children and Adult Services Conference
Source: gov.uk (2025-11-27)

Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted's Chief Inspector, spoke at the annual National Children and Adult Services Conference in Bournemouth.

Hello, everyone.

It’s really great to be here in Bournemouth today with all of you. I know it’s a busy few days during the event so I’m grateful to you for making this time to listen to me today.

I’m here today with Sally Robinson, who is our Deputy Director for Social Care, Inspection Policy and Development. I am really delighted to have appointed someone with such a strong and recent practice background, so I’m really grateful to her for joining me at this event.

Yvette sends her sincere regrets – I think this is the first NCAS conference that she’s had to miss in a long time, but the content of what I’ll be saying, and answering questions about, today is very much hers.

For me, I’ve been here at the NCAS conference once before, last autumn, up in Liverpool. And in that speech I stated that I had about 1,500 days left in this job – not that I’m counting!

One year on, that number’s now somewhere around 1,130 days. But I want to restate the same commitment I made last year: that I will spend every one of those remaining days listening, learning, and making changes that will improve children and young people’s lives.

There’s been a lot of progress since then. I’ll be talking about some of those changes today – about the changes we’ve already been making in the school sector which I know you’ll be interested in, what we’re seeing come out of those changes, and what change will look like for social care next spring and beyond. So, stay tuned for a bit more in a moment.

Education reform

Ofsted is transforming. We have a whole generation of ‘how we do things’ that we need to unlearn. And we have a huge opportunity to build on our successes.

A chance to improve our inspections and your experience of them. A chance to bring these inspections into line – this is the important part – with how your practice is changing as you deliver reforms. A chance to work together to radically improve education and care services for all children. Because they are the reason that every single one of us is in this room today.

In education, we’ve already been rolling out our refreshed approach to inspection – first with pilots in 143 early years settings, 115 schools and 28 further education providers, followed by the real inspections going live earlier this month.

The feedback so far paints a picture of sectors that have been hungry for change. We’re hearing that leaders appreciate the clarity they now get with inspections. Thanks to the toolkits, they know what to expect.

They’re saying that inspectors are ‘caring and fair’ when getting to understand the nursery and the community.

And they’re telling us that on the day it feels ‘collaborative, focused and reflective’ – more representative of the reality of daily life of a school, college or nursery.

One quote that’s really stuck with me is a headteacher of a primary school in Surrey, who described the process as ‘not softer, not easier, but more human’.

I really think that captures what these changes are all about. Delivering high standards for children through a rigorous but, crucially, fair inspection process.

Now one of the big changes – one that I am particularly proud of – is our focus on inclusion, which is at heart of the new education inspection framework. We are now grading all providers specifically against a new inclusion evaluation area, as well as weaving it through every other evaluation area.

We want to recalibrate: to make sure the entire education system is focusing on inclusion. A shift of focus which I hope and expect will improve children’s lives.

How the reforms will help you

I also believe it will help all of you. Because we are clear in our new education inspection toolkits that when we talk about inclusion, we’re talking specifically about children who face socio-economic disadvantage, children with SEND and also children known to social care. This will mean that schools, colleges and other education providers are actively expected to, and better incentivised, to support the children you work with day in, day out.

It is right to demand the best for children. And we want to do it together – to do it with, not to you. We are pleased ADCS is working with us to bolster SCCIF to include those who have direct practice experience in inspections, and we are very keen for you to be involved in a manageable way in the ILACS space too.

Our ultimate ambition is for a system where every part of inspection talks to one another.

As DCSs I know you and your teams will see children in your care in their children’s home, with their kinship or foster carers, as well as in their schools. You have a genuinely holistic overview of their progress and experiences.

I am keen for us, like you, to better join up the dots across the different inspections, ensuring they speak to each other and paint a much clearer picture of the experiences of children. Whether that’s the experiences of all children living in a particular area or certain specific groups of children in that area – or across the wider region or at a national level.

We think we can better use our insights to highlight the system issues, which in turn enables us to speak on those issues to government and to share our thinking with all of you as sector leaders.

Those insights will also inform our own work as the inspectorate and regulator.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking much more about ‘Ofsted: explore an area’: a new tool which joins together existing data with findings from the inspections carried out under our renewed framework. As we conduct more and more inspections, the service will evolve. It’s a way for parents and carers to make informed decisions about their child’s care and education.

And for professionals like yourselves, it will present a richer, more multi-layered picture of the factors that affect your services. The unique context you’re working in. The specific needs that you are facing in your area.

We’re also launching a research project looking at the placement challenges faced by local authorities, to dig into what currently works well and then we’ll share this good practice for others to learn from.

We are also about to publish a research report on school inspections and children with a social worker. This is about building on the refreshed education inspection framework’s focus on vulnerable children and supporting our inspectors and the sector to get it more right, more often for more children.

The social care context

We know the pressures you are all under: greater demands for services, costs rising, while budgets are tight. Layered on top of this is a SEND system in crisis, health services under pressure, and potential upheaval from local government reform. But Sally and I also see resilient and highly capable leadership teams who have constantly risen to the challenges you all face.

A challenge we have in common is the lack of the right homes in the right places to meet the needs of children. This is despite the highest number of applications to register children’s homes in Ofsted’s history. In short, there have been simply too many applications to deal with in a timely way.

We’ve changed our policy for prioritising applications, focusing first on those that address the shortage of placements for children in most urgent need and, more generally, in places where we see evidence that there simply aren’t enough suitable places for children. However, this is only the case in about 15% of the applications we receive.

We are now registering and inspecting supported accommodation – an area where we also, I’m afraid, have concerns. Too often, we see children with very high levels of need – children who absolutely need safe and quality care – placed somewhere that cannot meet those needs.

There are still far too many children in unregistered children’s homes, where there is also no process for assessing the quality of their care, or the suitability of the adults providing that care.

And as we are all aware of the spotlight that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and the Baroness Casey review has put on the importance of protecting children from the horror of child sexual abuse and exploitation. We all must do more to protect children, including by asking the uncomfortable questions and being unafraid to put children’s safety above all else.

At Ofsted, we will do our utmost to ensure our reforms hold all agencies, authorities and individuals accountable for the protection of children. We have started to undertake our JTAIs on sexual abuse within the family environment – another area we know we all need to strengthen practice in – and we will share our learning on how it might shape future changes to inspection.

The Big Listen

We heard many of these challenges from you directly, in response to our Big Listen last year – the biggest consultation in Ofsted’s history.

In the response to the Big Listen, social care professionals were consistently the most positive about our inspections out of all the professionals we work with.

You agreed with the coverage of what we inspect, the feedback we gather, and how you’re kept informed about findings. And you also told us that inspections kept disruption to a minimum, allowing you to focus on the essential services you provide.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing your views and for pointing out those aspects that work well. And thank you, too, for telling us your frustrations.

For example, you told us very clearly that you found single-word judgements – the overall effectiveness grades in our inspections of local authority children’s services – to be unhelpful. You felt that they were reductive and over-simplified the complexities of your work – and for some, they were seen as harmful and insulting.

When we published our response to the Big Listen, we publicly committed not only to remove the overall effectiveness grade, but also to replace it.

So, next year, when we make the next updates to the ILACS framework in April, we will remove the overall effectiveness grade for good.

The Big Listen also told us our inspection frameworks are not perfect. And the most critical and crucial insights we heard in children’s social care were from children themselves, including hundreds who had been supported by a social worker or had experience of care.

It was genuinely painful to hear that those children were deeply sceptical about the impact of our inspections. That they did not believe that inspections always captured the reality of being a child in their local authority or care home, or instigated the support they so clearly needed.

This is why, in the Big Listen, we said we will reform our children’s social care inspection frameworks, to raise standards across the sector and to do right by those children.

We know that most children are better served by remaining safely within their family, surrounded by loving relationships. This is why we want our inspections to recognise the value of family help, including early help and prevention. If those children cannot stay with their immediate families, the children’s social care system should better enable them to live with people who are known to them and love them. We need more kinship and fostering families.

We know this is a huge priority for Josh MacAlister, the new Minister for Children and Families, who I’m meeting with regularly and whose seminal review kickstarted an ambitious and transformative reform programme that Ofsted is now helping to deliver.

We have listened to all of you here, and the minister, on the need to align our frameworks more closely with those reforms. This is why I am announcing today a two-phased approach to reforming our inspection of local authority children’s services.

In phase one next year, as I’ve just said, we will remove the one-word judgement and make important revisions to the ILACS framework.

And for phase 2, we will consult on how to build our strong, existing foundations and bring all the best bits of ILACS into a renewed framework: a children and families services inspection framework for 2027 that sets new expectations and higher ambitions.

Changes in 2026

First I’ll linger for a moment on what to expect in April 2026. We’re working hard on the details and, in the new year, we’ll come forward with changes that focus on areas where I know you’re already beginning to deliver the government’s reform programme. I’m really pleased to say that these changes are backed by Josh MacAlister, and that we’ve been able to work so closely together.

We will be establishing a ‘task and finish group’ within Ofsted, to engage with you, experts and government and refine what we’re proposing as we focus more on areas like family help, fostering and multi-agency working. There are certainly some in this audience that we shall want in that group.

And as I mentioned, Ofsted has already committed to removing overall effectiveness grades across all the services we inspect. For inspections of local authority children’s services, we will do this in April 2026.

The refresh will further align ILACS with the National Framework, the Families First Partnership guide and anticipated revisions to Working Together. We need our framework changes to be in line with the changed expectations on you so we can fully reflect and report on your services as they are delivered.

As I said earlier, we know that, for most children, it is best to remain with their families, surrounded by love and the people who know them best.

We want to give more attention to birth parents and wider families’ views and to be truly ‘child-focused’.

We will do our utmost to make sure that ILACS focus more on supporting family networks and aiming to keep children with their families, wherever it’s possible and safe to do so. This means recognising the value of family help, maintaining family connections and kinship care, and supporting children as they return to their families after periods of being in care.

We want children and families to benefit from collaboration – in short, moving at child level towards that more holistic view that I spoke about earlier. When multi-agency partnerships play a full role in harnessing the expertise of a wider range of practitioners, you can make better decisions, earlier, for more children – and stem the flow towards child protection investigations. Your leadership, oversight and quality assurance of the new arrangements and practice will of course be important, particularly through these changes.

Where child protection is needed, we, like you, want it to be swift and purposeful – making sure we’re keeping families engaged and delivering timely change for children.

And for those needing emergency, respite or long-term care, we must get to a place where we have enough foster carers to care for them, and get those foster carers more support when it comes to caring for older children and those with higher needs.

We need to work together to get the right provision in place so you can make the right placement decisions for those children who do need residential care – ending the use of unregistered children’s homes at the earliest possibility. We welcome the powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to fine providers of these illegal activities, and once the bill is enacted we can begin implementing these powers.

You are well used to our ILACS refreshes. Yvette, Sally and I see resilient and purposeful leadership teams who have constantly risen to meet challenges and continued to deliver better, stronger services for children through 2 cycles of ILACS.

These changes, alongside our commitment to keep children’s progress and experiences front and centre, will strengthen ILACS for 2026, and they will form a solid foundation as we look to craft a renewed children and families services inspection framework for 2027.

Consultation

So, phase 2.

As I said earlier, we have already publicly committed to replace the overall effectiveness grade with a similar tool to a report card.

In education, you’ll have seen how report cards can offer a fuller, more rounded picture of what’s happening.

Through consultation, we want to find a tool that works for social care – a tool that helps us to give a set of assessments: highlighting where brilliant, meaningful work is being done, and pinpointing where things are not as good as they can be. A tool with more nuance, that allows us to better determine and call out whether an issue is an isolated one – or it’s part of a bigger local or regional failing.

Through both phases we will be engaging with you, seeking the advice of sector experts, pathfinder authorities and system leaders. We will be consulting on the second phase and looking, as ever, to you for your rigour and honesty – to help us get this right.

This is about making our inspection system fairer. More human. Inspecting you on what you must do and with our framework reflecting the very best evidence-based practice.

And as we continue to listen to children’s voices, we want to ensure parents and carers have a much louder voice, too.

Child-centred, family-focused, relationship-based practice which transforms children’s and families lives.

Put simply, we owe it to them.

Training and support for social care inspectors

None of this coming change will be possible without skilled, knowledgeable and experienced inspectors who can access all the latest thinking and training that they need to do their jobs.

Through inspection, we want our inspectors to get closer to the practice and understand the difference support is making for children, so that children and their families stay together, get the help they need, are safe and have stable homes.

So we are committing to making sure our inspection workforce are experts in the government’s reforms, and we’ll build our new framework with the help of expert leaders – you – many of whom have trailblazed reform in their areas.

We’ll bring together ADCS representatives, national advisors and nominated sector experts to create an advisory reference group.

They’ll be tasked with challenging our inspection policy thinking and practice – ensuring we’re being rigorous, bold and deeply informed in our decisions.

And they’ll also help with continuing professional development for our workforce – channelling their own expertise into our Ofsted Academy programme which sets the training and development given to our inspectors up and down the country.

Thank you and wrap-up

I want to close by saying, once again, thank you.

Thank you for the honesty and challenge you have brought to the entire process, throughout my entire time as His Majesty’s Chief Inspector so far. The rigour you bring, and the heartfelt dedication you have to improving services for children, is valued immensely.

It is a purpose we share: our very reason for existing is to improve children’s lives. And that means encouraging all the systems we inspect to do what’s best for those children – even, and especially, when it’s difficult.

We want to get better at helping sectors to act early, to make improvements, and to do right by the children in their care. And to do that, once again we need to draw on your help and expertise.

As we go out to consultation, we invite your feedback – the positive and, of course, the challenging. Tell us how we can be better. Tell us what you need. As I hope I’ve demonstrated today: we will listen, and we will act. I promise you that.

Getting this right, improving standards across services, has ripple effects beyond what we can measure.

It’s safety and calm for a child who, through no fault of their own, never had that stability in life.

It’s the adults in their lives talking to one another to make sure we see the whole child and everything they’re facing – whether it’s in school, in the home, or in their care setup.

And it is whole futures – entire lives – being pointed in a positive direction. Towards enduring relationships, fulfilling friendships and jobs. Towards a harmonious family life and all the other experiences and connections that life brings.

Thank you for all the work you do, every single day, in helping them get there. Thank you – it is vital work.

Sally and I are now pleased to take your questions.