Now that the dust has settled from the first wave of unannounced inspections, Nic Fell looks at what we can draw from the experience.

This is a sea change for many local authorities which are used to providing reports from data that is often days, weeks or even months old.

A recent survey conducted by Capita Children's Services revealed that 67% of local authority staff would be nervous about the quality of their children's services data for an inspection. More worrying still, in light of how quickly the inspectors need to get their hands on good data, 45% of respondents said that, on average, it took longer than one day for their data services teams to produce an ad hoc report. This is the sort of delay that will no longer be good enough.

Councils need to be able show how truancy rates are being tackled, for instance, or demonstrate looked-after children are progressing academically. And to do this effectively, they need to pool their data on children.

One contact I spoke to recently felt the fact that they had to pull data from numerous different systems was an issue during the no-notice inspection at his authority. ‘The problem is that we had data on a number of different databases, and when we pulled out reports, we could not actually be 100% sure if we were talking about the same children or different ones,' he said.

This is a view echoed by others, not only because of the new inspections process but also because bringing together the data on children meant councils could gain a better understanding of their circumstances. They could then target their finite resources more effectively and were able to report more easily – for both internal and external reviews – on the overall impact they were having.

The children, family and adult services team at