Peterborough City Council: Local Spotlight

A recent online poll saw Peterborough voted as the “worst place to live” in England – the third year running the Cambridgeshire city has “won” the title.

Yet since its creation under the new town reforms of 1967, Peterborough has gained a reputation as being a boom town. Between 1971 and 1991, its population grew 45 per cent and now stands at more than 200,000, as the town has proved successful at attracting investment from commercial and residential developers.

Last year, an application to build a new “employment-focused university”– run by Anglia Ruskin University – was approved, and there are plans to extend and expand the city’s railway station to accommodate a growth in the number of people commuting to London for work.

Economic conditions have tended to be good in the city, with unemployment running at roughly the average for England, although the proportion of young people who leave school without a job or training place is above regional and national averages.

Social problems

High employment levels mask significant social problems in the city: a quarter of children live in low-income households and a third enter reception class without having achieved a good level of development (see graphics). Teenage pregnancy rates are almost twice that of the regional average and 24 per cent of year six pupils are overweight or obese compared to 21 per cent across England.

Attainment 8 scores for Peterborough secondaries track below the average for the region and England, however children looked after by Peterborough City Council outperform the region and national averages for educational progress at age 16.

Children’s services was rated “good” overall by Ofsted nearly three years ago. Inspectors said services had “improved significantly” since the previous visit in 2015, and praised the “stable and effective” senior leadership team for driving improvements.

“Leaders have an accurate understanding of strengths and weaknesses and have created the conditions for social work practice to thrive. There is a strong learning culture underpinned by an effective quality assurance and performance framework,” the inspectors said.

The department has been led for nine years by Wendi Ogle-Welbourn, corporate director for people and communities and deputy chief executive.

In April 2018, Ogle-Welbourn was also appointed director of people and communities for Cambridgeshire County Council making her accountable for adult and children’s services, education, community and safety, housing and commissioning across both councils.

The challenge that comes with being responsible for such a large brief is offset by the economies of scale and opportunities to share good practice across both councils, she says (see DCS view).

In recent years, children’s services has undergone a series of operational changes. In 2016, it entered into a £126m deal for Tact Fostering and Adoption to run permanency services for 10 years, in what the charity called “the greatest strategic initiative [it had] ever undertaken”.

Yet within three years the partnership collapsed because of the higher than anticipated costs involved and difficulty finding sufficient local placements. The deal was terminated by mutual agreement and the permanency service transferred back to the council in September 2019.

Ogle-Welbourn says the council has had success recruiting more foster carers locally thanks to the development of a new recruitment strategy.

DCS VIEW
CROSS-BOUNDARY ROLE HAS INCREASED SCALE AND RESILIENCE OF SERVICES

By Wendi Ogle-Welbourn, executive director people and communities, Peterborough City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council

Children’s services were judged “good” by Ofsted at the last full Inspection, and inspectors were very positive about the quality of practice and consistent delivery to families in Peterborough. This has continued and been assisted by the ongoing implementation of the Family Safeguarding model, offering an innovative approach to working with vulnerable children with multi-disciplinary teams including professionals from adult services offering a wide range of support.

The model of practice – motivational interviewing – has now been adopted across all social work services and has enabled a consistent approach to management oversight across all social work teams.

We have refreshed our supervision procedures in light of feedback from staff; have offered bespoke training for managers to develop their skills in this area; and in the main family safeguarding teams, we offer a comprehensive casework supervision model to which all professionals in the team contribute.

Most importantly, we have continued to maintain generally low caseloads for social workers and enabled our stable frontline management team to have time to individually support their teams. This has been particularly important over recent months and is reflected in the continued commitment of our staff to doing all they can to support our most vulnerable children and families at such a challenging time.

It will come as no surprise that, as with most local authorities, recruiting qualified and experienced social workers is our biggest workforce challenge. However, we have been successful in recruiting staff; and our vacancy rate and the number of agency staff we employ have both decreased since our last Ofsted inspection.

We are also committed to the development of our staff and have had much greater success in retaining social workers and managers over recent years than was historically the case.

The broader geographical role that I have as director of children’s services across Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council means that we can make better use of resources such as marketing to support recruitment, and increasingly in areas like improving training and development for our workforce.

I have found that any leadership challenges of working across two authorities have been more than offset by the increased resilience and scale of services. The two authorities mean that I can draw on the strengths of each, creating a positive environment where we can share learning and support one another when needed.

Rates of children in care in Peterborough are now significantly below the statistical neighbour average, in large part because of our successful implementation of the Family Safeguarding model, as developed originally in Hertfordshire. We have also implemented a successful local fostering recruitment strategy, which is proving successful in attracting new fostering households.