Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council: local authority assessment

Staff feedback about the local authority’s culture of continuous learning and improvement was positive. There was support for continuous professional development (CPD). Most staff said they were well-supported through supervisions and appraisals, and there was ongoing access to internal and external learning and support to ensure Care Act duties were delivered safely and effectively. For example, staff said, in response to an increased prevalence of people experiencing self-neglect, staff had received specific training to help them to understand the issue and ways to support them. Staff were encouraged to take up training and development opportunities, such as apprenticeships, Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) courses and to use nationally recognised CPD tools to track their learning. Commissioning staff were taking part in a national commissioning skills development programme. Staff and leaders said quality auditing was embedded into their teams’ practice, as well as reflective practice, peer-to-peer and leader shadowing. Leaders attributed low in-house vacancy and turnover rates to the positive, supportive culture and the learning and development options available to staff.

There was a desire to work collaboratively with people and partners to promote and support innovative and new ways of working that improved people's social care experiences and outcomes. For example, multi-agency training programmes were implemented to develop skills and competence across the adult social care workforce. The local authority recently engaged partners in “The Big Conversation” to gather feedback about their services and community needs, and an award-winning ‘Festival of Learning’, which was established in 2021 and co-produced with people with lived experience, brought people together to learn new skills. Additionally, leaders told us training had been developed and delivered by a person accessing care and support, which supported staff to deliver person-centered care.

There was a strong commitment to co-production and we saw examples of this in practice. The Anti-Poverty Strategy 2024 had been created with people from the local community and many other strategies referenced an ambition to develop this approach towards true coproduction. There was a core co-production function facilitated by the local authority and majority-run by residents called the Making It Real Board (MIRB). The local authority and MIRB was particularly proud of a recently published Local Account which set out the MIRB achievements in the local authority’s Health and Wellbeing services over the previous 12 months, as well as challenges overcome and priorities for the year ahead.

Members of the MIRB were positive about the impact of the group’s work on peoples’ experiences of adult social care services. For example, members told us they had helped co-produce training for taxi drivers to increase understanding and awareness of risks to vulnerable residents and help keep them safe. Beyond the Making It Real Board, partners’ experiences of being involved in co-production work with the local authority were mixed. Some voluntary and community sector (VCS) groups told us they felt excluded from co-production, which reduced their strategic influence and understanding of the local authority’s approach to addressing key issues such as support for people with needs who were awaiting adequate accommodation. Local authority leaders had identified the need to build on the foundations already in place to embed coproduction across all areas of design and development work, and to extend the range of people involved beyond the MIRB, to be fully reflective of the local area. A Lived Experience Co-ordinator and Assurance and Coproduction Manager post had been created to lead this work and to provide a dedicated focus.

The local authority shared learning and best practice with peers and system partners to influence and improve how care and support was provided. For example, the multi-agency change programme Powering Our Future promoted shared learning across services, such as joint safeguarding training undertaken by adult and children’s services. As a result of the local authority’s Well-Led Leadership Development programme, care providers were engaged with development work, including research into the use of virtual reality in care homes.

The local authority received few formal complaints; staff told us that complaints were often resolved early, thus reducing the need for people to use a formal process. Leaders told us that they wanted to continue to improve how they listened to and learned from people’s feedback about their experiences of care and support, particularly around informal complaints and feedback, where the absence of formal recording may result in missed learning opportunities.

Learning briefings were produced and disseminated through the directorate following Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs). Following a Serious Care Review, improvements were made to direct payment processes to ensure Personal Assistants have a clear process to raise safety issues on behalf of themselves or the people they were caring for.

Learning from feedback from care providers, staff, and people was listened to and used to influence decision making and to improve practice. For example, it was evident that feedback from care providers and residents in the community were used to inform the development of the local authority’s Care Academy model which promoted and supported learning and recruitment to the social care sector. The local authority had also secured funding to develop a digital application to gather feedback from people accessing care and support in real time. This demonstrated how the organisation was seeking to innovatively increase and utilise feedback about services with a view to improving peoples’ experiences and outcomes.

There were multiple ways the local authority was capturing staff feedback and feeding information back to frontline practitioners, such as through “Making It Happen” groups, peer reflection sessions and Best Interest forums. Staff told us that senior leaders usually listened to them when they raised gaps in policies and provision, for example around transition support for young people, and provided them with a response to the issues raised. A recent staff survey showed a small increase in the number of staff who agreed with the phrase “My ideas are listened to” relative to the one completed in 2018.

While there was no formal process for recording compliments in place, leaders told us it was practice for staff to notify their manager when they receive a compliment. Managers recorded and acknowledged this, forwarding the evidence to senior leaders who would directly contact the worker to offer congratulations. Leaders recognised the need for a formalised process by which to share examples of good practice across the directorate and an action to develop a process to analyse this data was included in the Workforce Development Plan.