THE Department for Education has come under fire for not cracking down hard enough on local authorities failing to keep vulnerable children safe from harm.

An increasing number of children in England need the protection of local authorities, but Surrey County Council was rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted in 2015 for “widespread and serious failures”, which were leaving children at risk of harm.

Following its fifth monitoring visit since it judged Surrey inadequate, Ofsted reported a few weeks ago that the council was “beginning to make progress from a low starting point, to improve services for children”.

In a letter following the most recent visit, which was copied to DfE, Ofsted inspector Linda Steele noted: “At the time of this monitoring visit, assistant team managers had, been allocated 99 children’s cases.

“A further 93 children in the referral, assessment and intervention service, who required a statutory assessment or social work service, did not have an allocated social worker.

“The majority of these children had been waiting for up to five days, but a small minority had been waiting for as long as 20 days without purposeful statutory involvement to assess and meet their needs. Senior managers took immediate action to review each case and identified that some of these children’s cases were mistakenly open due to recording errors.

“Child protection enquiries are generally thorough and timely. The majority of strategy discussions include only the police and social care. The records of the discussions vary in quality, and include limited initial information from other agencies.

“The timeliness of child protection conferences is poor, with a decline in July 2016 to 53 per cent being held within 15 working days of the strategy discussion. This means some children are experiencing delay between risks being identified and multi-agency consideration of plans to protect them.

“The quality and effectiveness of core group records require further improvement to ensure that timely action is taken to prevent drift and delay.”

Nationally, referrals to children’s social care have increased by 15 per cent over the past 10 years from 552,000 in 2004/5, to 635,600 in 2014/15.

Last month, the spending watchdog National Audit Office (NAO) said help for at-risk children across the country was “unsatisfactory and inconsistent” and urged DfE to “show a sense of urgency and determination” in delivering change by a promised target date of 2020.

NAO head Sir Amyas Morse said: “Six years have passed since the department recognised that children’s services were not good enough.

“It is extremely disappointing that, after all its efforts, far too many children’s services are still not good enough.”

Responding, a DfE spokeswoman said: “Keeping children safe from harm is an absolute priority for this government. We are taking tough action to drive up standards in children’s services across the country, stepping in when councils aren’t doing well enough and linking them up with better performing local authorities to share best practice.”

Commenting on the report, public accounts committee chairwoman Meg Hillier said: “Children in need depend on child protection services to get it right for them where other adults in their lives have failed.

“It is horrifying that over three-quarters of local authorities’ child protection services are inadequate or require improvement to be good.

“The DfE needs to take radical action to meet their aim for all vulnerable children to receive high quality care by 2020.”

Responding to Ofsted’s verdict following its latest visit, a Surrey County Council spokesman said: “Protecting vulnerable children is our absolute priority and we’re pleased Ofsted has recognised the improvements we have made and that progress is gaining momentum.

“A great deal has changed since Ofsted’s initial inspection including our strengthened leadership team, the support we provide to social workers and our work with other organisations but we know there are areas of our work where improvement is still needed and we are all focused on making that happen.”