Integrated inspection of children’s services – joint area reviews (JARs)

Joint area reviews (JARs) look at children’s services within local authority areas and focus on the experiences of children and young people aged 0-19 years old. In particular, they focus on the five outcomes for wellbeing in childhood and later life as set out in "Every Child Matters: Change for Children":

• being healthy
• staying safe
• enjoying and achieving
• making a positive contribution
• achieving economic wellbeing

About JARs
JARs are carried out under the Children Act 2004, by arrangements managed by Ofsted and agreed with all other participating inspectorates, including the Healthcare Commission.

Within local authority areas, JARs assess the contribution of relevant services including council services, health services and publicly funded services provided by voluntary bodies. Healthcare organisations, as whole organsiations, are not inspected as part of a JAR. However, comments are made on local healthcare services for children and young people particularly around access and capacity and are related to primary care trusts, relevant provider trusts and strategic health authorities.

JARs take into account the annual assessment of healthcare bodies, particularly in relation to partnership working, leadership and the capacity to improve. Any serious issues identified during a JAR will be referred back to the home inspectorate for the service concerned; those relating to healthcare providers will be referred back to the Healthcare Commission for further work to be carried out.

Between September 2005 and December 2008, each of the 150 local authority children’s services areas in England will be reviewed. 

Read published reports of local authority areas (Opens new window)

Modified JARs
In order to further improve the JARs, from spring 2007 there will be some key modifications to the methodology. The most significant changes to the existing methodology are as follows:

• fieldwork will be focused on the most vulnerable children and young people and also where performance is indentified as being weak
• the size of inspection teams will vary according to the overall performance of local authorities
• the neighbourhood study will be replaced by visits within a less defined local area
• modification to the requirement to report on all 36 key judgements for all children and young people

JARs and the annual health check

As part of our annual health check, the boards of NHS trusts are required to make a self-assessment and public declaration on the extent to which their organisation has met the Department of Health’s core standards. The findings of the JARs feed into the annual health check primarily through our process of ongoing assurance which checks the declarations of trusts against a wide range of information to identify anomolies which may indicate potential non-compliance.

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