Nottingham City Council has been given more than £500,000 by the Government to improve its 'inadequate' children's services. Ofsted gave the authority its lowest rating after an inspection last July, which found too many children were being left with "insufficient protection".
Government commissioners could have been sent in to run the council's children's services following the inspection report, which said some children meeting the threshold for social care intervention waited for up to six weeks to be seen. But this step was avoided and the Department for Education (DfE) is instead monitoring progress.
The council has now announced that it has been successful in bidding for DfE grant funding to help improve its children's services. In documents published on May 10, the council says it has been allocated £504,285.
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The money is due to be spent in four main areas, the most expensive being a revamp of the case management system used by the council. Changes will allow "social workers to work with a system that reduces duplication, meets their needs and enables better oversight and reporting of practice", with this element set to cost around £328,000.
Around £106,000 will be spent on workforce training, including a two day course for the leadership team and a one day "restorative practice" course for 800 practitioners. The rest of the money will go on hiring a 'trauma informed lead manager' and a 'children's improvement specialist' for six months.
Samantha Morris, Nottingham City Council's Head of Children's Strategy and Improvement, writes in the documents: "The areas identified have been identified as areas of work that will reach the maximum number of the workforce as possible to support wider, continuous improvement. The activities will support the whole workforce to deliver quality services for children and families through training and development [and] reduction of bureaucracy through a more efficient and effective functioning of the case management systems."
Ofsted will eventually re-inspect but before then, in which inspectors will have carried out around six monitoring visits in Nottingham. Cheryl Barnard, the portfolio holder for children, young people and schools at the time, said in a meeting last year that the authority's improvements were being "hampered" by a nationwide shortage of social workers.
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