Portsmouth City Council's children's home is branded 'inadequate' after major safeguarding failures

The education watchdog gave the home its lowest rating after an April inspection found children were being place 'at risk of harm' due to poor practises.

Inspectors found concerns had not been properly investigated, despite 'positive relationships' between staff, children and parents.

'Poor safeguarding practice was a contributory factor to children suffering harm,' the report by Jennie Christopher says. 'Staff missed opportunities to prevent harm from happening and reoccurring.

'They did not accurately assess the potential risks that children might pose to each other and the supervision arrangements in place for children did not provide sufficient protection.'

The report says there were 'at least two occasions' where children from outside the home stayed undetected overnight in the room of a child deemed to be at risk of exploitation.

'Staff did not act to prevent this, even though there was reasonable cause to suspect that there was a risk,' the report adds. 'The lack of supervision of children and the low levels of professional curiosity mean that some children have not been kept safe.'

In another case, a child who was not allowed access to a mobile phone was 'easily able' to take one from a staff member and had also taken the phone of a younger child more than once.

The home was rated 'inadequate' in each of the assessed areas which includes how well children are protected and the effectiveness of its leadership due to these safeguarding 'failures'.

Sarah Daly, the council's director of children, families and education, said measures have already been introduced in a bid to improve the home.

'We are extremely disappointed that one of our children's homes was recently judged as inadequate by Ofsted,' she said.

'As soon as we were told of the provisional inadequate judgement we took immediate action and put an improvement plan in place to address the issues identified.

'We hope that when the home is re-inspected Ofsted will agree that changes have been made to prevent similar issues ever happening again.'