The new chief of Sefton’s children’s services was grilled yesterday on changes being put in place after protestors gathered outside Bootle Town Hall.
A meeting of Sefton’s overview and scrutiny committee was held yesterday, June 6, after it was moved to a new venue after dozens of parents descended on the town hall in anger at failings involving the troubled service.
At the meeting members of the committee were presented with an update on transformations being carried out to the services.
Sefton’s children’s services were hit with a dire Ofsted rating last year which led to the installation of a government-appointed commissioner after years of “drift and delay” that inspectors said had left vulnerable children at risk of harm.
Dr Rhistardh Hare, who had been acting director of children’s services following the departure of Martin Birch earlier this year, was recently announced as his permanent replacement.
READ MORE: Grim warning signs as cases of medieval disease surge across England
At the meeting, with new chair Cllr Judy Hardman overseeing proceedings alongside her new deputy Cllr Natasha Carlin, officers told of change “heading in the right direction.”
Dr Hare spoke of measures including the social work academy, which had been set up to improve retention and development of in-house social workers and end the borough’s reliance on expensive agency staff.
He said recruitment for dozens of social workers from abroad had also been “very successful” with nearly 30 new starters due to come in to the borough in the coming months.
Dr Hare said: “The focus is fundamentally on the recruitment of staff in the service, improvement of practice, assessment plans and work with domestic violence and abuse” as well as the “continued realignment” of mental health provision and the rest of children’s services.
Dr Hare also spoke of the expansion of a pilot programme to bring in specialist business support workers to take the administrative burden from social workers.
He said: “It’s not a radical idea. If social workers are spending 70% of their time at computer screens and 30% of time with families it is a no brainer if we have highly qualified highly skilled business support workers” to free social workers up to meet with families.
Liberal democrat Cllr Leo Evans asked about culture change – a key issue raised in previous reviews of the service.
He said: “As we all know in organisations this normally stems from the top down as much as we’d like a bottom up approach.”
Dr Hare said there is now a “very visible accessible leadership team” within the department.
He said reference to a culture of non compliance in the reports “means where people are saying they’ve done something and they haven’t done it or have taken the easiest option to do that thing, we’re seeing less and less of that due to a very strong and robust quality assurance framework.”
He said: “It’s the atmosphere, the voice of people on the floor, confidence, complaints from families, KPIs [key performance indicators] that we look at and most importantly when speaking to families” adding: “we can see things being done much better.”
Cllr Evans asked about positive comments from families in the report, stating: “Yes they’re heartwarming to read but I’ve sat on this committee for the better part of four years and have seen comments like this time and time again that don’t give a true picture of what’s happening” and added: “are the negative comments being left out?”
Dr Hare said the comments “have not been cherrypicked.”
He added: “It’s a good point to raise we should be showing some of the complaints. Three families over the last 24 hours have been raising complaints, they do definitely happen.”
In response to a question from Cllr Mike Prendergast about the pace of change, Dr Hare said there was evidence this was accelerating.
He said: “It was going much too slow but we had to get teams in place, staff in place, quality assurance frameworks in place. All these things were absent 12 months ago.
“The pace of improvement wasn’t quick enough, the governance wasn’t in place, but that governance is now in place.”
Assistant director of safeguarding and quality assurance Joe Banham said that audits were showing an improvement in how cases were being managed, with less ‘inadequate’ and some good ratings coming through.
The new chair also signalled some changes for future meetings, suggesting cabinet member reports could be included earlier in the meeting to allow for questions to be raised.
Cllr Hardman said: “As a scrutiny committee we’re supposed to be scrutinising your work and your decisions and sometimes it feels we hammer away at the officers and don’t always save any of our powder for you.”
Cabinet member for children’s services, Cllr Mhairi Doyle said she was “happy to go first and then I can go home.”
Deputy chair Cllr Carlin also asked about pre-scrutiny of cabinet member decisions going to cabinet, with the committee agreeing to seek clarification as to the process for future reports.
READ MORE:
Thug who punched pregnant girlfriend in the stomach walks free from court
Grandad goes to bookies with dog every day for touching reason
