Official Statistics

Methodology report: local authority inspection outcomes as at 31 March 2026

Published 6 August 2026

Applies to England

The local authority inspection outcomes as at 31 March 2026 release includes:

• main findings
• underlying data
• methodology report
• pre-release access list

Introduction

This document contains the methodology relevant to our official statistics release of local authority inspection outcomes, which we publish once a year.

Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to. You are welcome to contact us directly on socialcareSAO@ofsted.gov.uk with any comments about how we meet these standards, or if you have any questions or feedback about our release. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or via the OSR website.

Users can find out more about how Ofsted applies the code of practice for statistics to our statistical releases on our Ofsted standards for official statistics page.

Methodology

Ofsted regulates and inspects to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages.

In England, 153 local authorities are responsible for ensuring and overseeing the effective delivery of social care services for children in need of help and protection, children in care, and care leavers. We inspect local authority children’s services under section 136(2) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. We carry out these inspections under the inspections of local authority children’s services (ILACS) framework. You can find individual inspection reports on the Ofsted reports website.

This official statistics release reports on the outcomes of the local authority children’s services inspections carried out between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, where the inspection report was published by 30 June 2026. The release includes outcomes from the previous reporting year where the inspection report was published after 30 June 2025. It also provides the most recent inspection outcome for each of the 153 local authorities in England.

In November 2025, we published a press release which announced that, from April 2026, we would remove the overall effectiveness judgement in ILACS. The move followed the response to the Big Listen consultation and Ofsted’s commitment to making inspections fairer, including by removing overall effectiveness grades across all the remits it inspects and regulates. This change does not affect any of the inspections reported in this official statistics release.

Inspection window

There is no fixed cycle or end date for the ILACS programme. We use the intelligence and information we have to inform decisions about how best to inspect each local authority. Standard and short inspections will usually happen once every 3 years, plus or minus 6 months.

There will be times when concerns arise about a local authority. The regional director will decide whether to carry out an inspection (standard or short inspection), at which we make graded judgements, or whether a focused visit would be more appropriate. In most cases, if the next standard or short inspection is not due, we will carry out a focused visit. This gives us, and the local authority, the opportunity to identify what is going well and what needs to improve before the next judgement inspection.

After a focused visit, we will not usually follow up with an urgent inspection. We will publish the focused visit letter setting out the areas that the local authority needs to address. We will review the progress in these areas through the local authority’s self-evaluation and the annual engagement meeting until the next judgement inspection happens. This approach aims to support improvement, while still holding the local authority children’s services to account in meeting their legal responsibilities to children in need of help, protection and care.

Within the ILACS system, deciding which type of inspection to deploy in which local authority is a complex and dynamic process.

We use 3 different proportionate inspection pathways, depending on the most recent inspection judgements. More details of these pathways can be found within the applying a proportionate and risk-based approach to inspection section of the ILACS framework.

Data

Information on inspection outcomes is extracted directly from our administrative system and is aggregated using SQL. The code used is reviewed and revised regularly.

This release reflects the situation as at 31 March 2026. Therefore, it does not include any inspections that took place after this date. The production cut-off period for including published inspection reports in this release is 3 calendar months after the end of the reporting period. Inspections that took place before 31 March but did not have a report published by 30 June will be included in the next release.

We aggregate inspection data in 3 different datasets, which constitute the underlying data published as part of this release:

• Inspections as at 31 March: the most recent inspection judgements and sub-judgements of local authorities in England as at 31 March 2026 with reports published by 30 June 2026, under the ILACS framework
• In-year inspections: all short and standard inspections, monitoring visits and focused visits that have taken place under the ILACS framework between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 with a report published by 30 June 2026. Inspections that took place between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 where the report was published after 30 June 2025 are also included
• ILACS inspection history: short and standard inspection history as at 31 March 2026 for all local authorities in England since 2018, when the ILACS framework was introduced

The main findings of this release are based on an analysis of the underlying data.

Where we hold sensitive or personal data, the disclosure control processes we have in place ensure that this data is not published. All data releases follow Ofsted’s confidentiality and revisions policies. All staff using sensitive data have been trained in confidentiality and disclosure awareness.

Comparing inspection outcomes across reporting years

From January 2023, the ILACS framework included a separate judgement on the experiences and progress of care leavers. This area was previously evaluated as part of the judgement ‘the experiences and progress of children in care and care leavers’ and was separated following a consultation in summer 2022.

Since the structural changes to some local authorities, all have now received an inspection under the ILACS framework. The changes were to the following:

• From 1 April 2019, the local authorities Bournemouth and Poole combined into a single local authority named ‘Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole’; Dorset had a change of boundaries following the removal of Christchurch
• From 1 April 2021, the single local authority Northamptonshire was split into 2 separate local authorities: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire
• From 1 April 2023, the single local authority of Cumbria was split into 2 separate local authorities: Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness

The inspection outcomes for these 3 old local authorities can still be found in the ILACS inspection history tab of the underlying data of this publication and have a local authority status of ‘No longer exists’. However, due to our retention policy, the provider webpages are no longer available.

Inspection outcomes for local authority children’s services were previously included in the publication Children’s social care data in England. From August 2024, we have published local authority inspection outcomes as a separate release, focusing on inspections that took place after the introduction of the ILACS framework in 2018.

Data on historical inspections are still available in our Children’s social care statistics collection page.

Methods and quality

This data is currently published once a year, on the date pre-announced in the publication schedule. This schedule also provides information on any delay in publication.

The average production time for this official statistics release is approximately 6 weeks. This time includes extracting, cleaning and analysing the data; drafting findings; quality assuring all outputs; securing internal sign-off; and uploading the information to GOV.UK.

We announce publication of the statistics on our social media channels on the day of publication. We give pre-release access in accordance with the Pre-release to Official Statistics Order (2008). You can find the list of postholders granted pre-release access as a separate document accompanying each release.

Although we aim to produce the highest-quality statistics, there are occasional differences between the data on the administrative system and the final inspection report. Reasons for this include changes being made during the quality assurance process for the reports.

As part of the production of this publication, we perform rigorous quality assurance checks, including comparing it with existing published reports to ensure that the data on the administrative system matches the inspection reports. All individual inspection reports are published and available to the public, which offers an additional level of transparency and assurance.

More than one analyst is involved in producing and analysing the data, and quality assurance is always carried out by a different team member to the person who produced the work. We carry out quality checks on the SQL code used to export data, all processing and calculations, the release template, the combined dataset, the analysis, and the main findings. All outputs are reviewed and subject to a sign-off process to ensure suitability for publication.

We publish revisions to the data, including adding the outcomes of any inspection reports published after the original cut-off date, in line with our revisions policy for official statistics.

The technical production of the official statistics publication may also result in manual errors. We use a rigorous procedure for assuring data quality, with the aim of minimising the risk of reporting errors. If an error is discovered in the document, we place a note on the website and upload a corrected version of the document as soon as possible.

Read more information on issues relating to the use of administrative data.

Other sources of similar data

No comparable data is published by other organisations that produce official statistics for inspections of local authority children’s services in England.

Several third parties provide datasets and tools that display publicly available Ofsted inspection judgements. Some of these may be collated using web scraping to extract inspection outcomes from published inspection reports. We cannot comment on the quality of these datasets.

For the devolved nations, inspections are carried out and reviews and reports published by the following:

• the Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW)
• the Care Inspectorate in Scotland
• the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland

Relevance

Information in this release has 7 distinct purposes:

• it allows media outlets to use our key findings to inform the public about the quality of children’s social care across the country and in local areas
• it allows users to monitor the quality of provision available at a national and local authority level
• it gives an accurate picture of the quality of provision, which influences policy decisions about the location
• it helps to identify areas of weak performance, which assists the DfE and local authorities in developing policies and strategies to address performance-related issues
• it informs discussions and decisions among stakeholder groups (including local authorities), academics and other interested parties across the sector
• it allows Ofsted to meet our legal obligations, and the key messages contribute to the findings in His Majesty’s Chief Inspector’s Annual Report to Parliament
• in Ofsted, analysis of inspection outcomes informs the development of the inspection framework and underpins policies to improve standards

Accessibility

We publish our releases in an accessible format on GOV.UK. The information is publicly available and there are no restrictions on access to the published data. The underlying data file published as part of this release meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 accessibility requirements, as recommended in the GSS guidance on releasing statistics in spreadsheets.

Providing underlying data allows users to perform their own analysis. Users may use and reuse this information (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Glossary

Definitions of terms are in the statistical glossary.