Sections 4 and 6 have demonstrated the risks potentially caused through disaggregation of demand variation and unit cost of delivering people services. However, the risks associated with service performance, quality and outcomes are equally, if not more, important, given the high-performance in most existing county councils. Through the engagement carried out for this programme, service directors hypothesised that people-based services delivered by larger local authorities were typically more highly rated by regulators. Therefore disaggregation posed a risk that service quality would be negatively impacted by disaggregation. To investigate this, further analysis was conducted, seeking to isolate the impact of scale on the ratings provided for children’s services by Ofsted, and for adult social care by CQC.
Exclusion of any subset of councils from this analysis would have a significant distorting effect on any conclusions and serve to skew the results. In the case of previous analysis where county councils have been excluded, this has skewed the results negatively, given the comparatively high ratings of these existing councils and their large scale. When all available data for Ofsted inspections is included, and the the raw data is simply plotted against population without controlling for other factors, it clearly shows a positive relationship between scale and Ofsted ratings (see Figure 28 below). But secondly, in order to fully test the relationship between population and performance, a statistically robust analysis needs to control for other factors with a known relationship with children's services outcomes, such as deprivation and median income. This can only be done through a regression analysis. For this programme of work, a regression model was built that accounts for population, indices of multiple deprivation, median income and region to forecast expected Ofsted score, developed from nationally available datasets. The data source for population size vs Ofsted rating is the ILAC data, including all published ratings. This regression model (which controls for deprivation and median income) indicates a positive coefficient on population against Ofsted score. This indicates that a larger population size will result in a higher probability of a more positive Ofsted score. The relationship is illustrated below in Figure 29. This analysis therefore confirms that larger authorities are indeed more likely to receive a good or outstanding Ofsted rating for children’s services. 15
8.1 Scale and service quality
Previous national analysis has suggested there is no relationship between the population size of unitary authorities and their performance in areas including children’s services and adult social care. This also suggested that smaller authorities are more likely to receive a 'good' or 'outstanding' rating. 14 However, in order to test the relationship between scale and performance, firstly any analysis must also include all published data. Appendix 3 shows that currently 16 county councils are rated as either good or outstanding by Ofsted for children's services, with only one county council rated as inadequate, and five as requiring improvement.
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