Wirral Borough Council: Local Spotlight

The Metropolitan Borough of Wirral is part of the Liverpool City Region. It is bounded to the west by the River Dee, forming a boundary with Wales, to the east by the River Mersey, and to the north by the Irish Sea.

The roughly rectangular peninsula is about 15 miles long and seven miles wide. Despite this narrow geography, it contains a wide range of socio-economic communities, with affluent areas largely in the west, south and north coast of the peninsula, and deprived areas concentrated in the east, around the built-up district of Birkenhead.

Around one in four children live in poverty before housing costs, a rise of 2.7 percentage points on the 2016/17 level according to data collected for the End Child Poverty group. This rate rises to 29 per cent once housing costs have been factored in.

Poverty levels are a likely factor in the area's poor health outcomes for children. Its child mortality rate (one to 17 years) is 16.5 per 100,000 children, a third higher than the England level of 11.2 per 100,000 and above the average of 14.1 per 100,000. Wirral is also above the national and regional averages for the number of hospital admissions of 15- to 24-year-olds with unintentional or deliberate injuries, and hospital admissions as a result of self-harm of young people aged 10 to 24.

Much like Liverpool, its neighbour across the River Mersey, Wirral's economy was built on the shipping industry and hit hard times in the late 20th century when trade to and from its docks declined. However, the council has ambitious regeneration plans for the eastern part of the borough through a partnership with urban regeneration specialists, Muse Developments. There are plans for a new business district in Birkenhead as well as improved leisure and civic facilities, all aimed at driving the creation of jobs, opportunity and social value throughout the borough.

The council's corporate director for children Paul Boyce sits on the board of the regeneration organisation, and says his role is to "push the interests" of disadvantaged young people and families so their needs are considered in the redevelopment plans.

Improvement in practice

Boyce arrived in December 2017 - after nearly five years as executive director (children) at Knowsley Council - when Wirral children's services was rated "inadequate" overall after an inspection in July 2016. In August, Ofsted raised the judgment to "requires improvement" after an improvement in practice across all areas of children's social care, with inspectors particularly praising the quality of leadership in the department (see DCS view). That task has involved completely overhauling the structure and culture of the department and significantly reducing the use of agency social work staff.

The improvement has been achieved while looked-after children rates have risen from 99 to 123 per 10,000 children between 2016 and 2018 (see graphics), a rate of growth that has outstripped that of the North West region and England as a whole.

Despite this, children in care in Wirral perform above national and regional levels at average Attainment 8 scores, while the number of 16- and 17-year-olds not in education, employment or training is also lower than neighbouring areas and the England average.

However, Boyce admits outcomes for children in care generally "are poor so there's a long way to go". "There's a lot of investment in the area planned in the next decade and we're putting looked-after children at the centre of that," he adds.

DCS VIEW
Department overhaul was controversial but necessary

By Paul Boyce, corporate director for children, Wirral Borough Council

When I arrived things had been done to address the deficiencies identified in 2016. There was much stronger engagement with children's services across the council and a package of investment had been implemented. There was political consensus about the investment and the work that needed to be done, and the chief executive was supportive of that.

My first impression was that people wanted to improve but were not clear how to do it. On my second day I was sitting in on an Ofsted monitoring visit. The self-evaluation was that we thought we were getting better but external feedback was we weren't.

There was a lot of fragmentation: teams were in different buildings doing different things and there was a lack of consistency in practice and management.

We engaged with the workforce and gave them a clear message about meeting the needs of children and families and the need to work as a single service and not in a fragmented way.

Controversially, we relocated everyone back into one building. As an organisation we are not big enough to justify having different headquarters. It's proved to be a real bonus in getting consistency of approach.

We've restructured how children's services is organised, and identified inadequate practice and individuals who were part of the problem. It was quite dysfunctional, and over 18 months, we dealt with individual staff - roughly 10 per cent of the 350 social workers. The vast majority were agency staff, so when you put your cards on the table they just stop coming in. The hardest to get out were some of the most senior people; the "characters". You need to get that out of the organisation even if that takes a long time because it sends a strong message about coming to work to do the right thing for families, not for our own benefit or power trips. I felt sorry for some people who felt they'd been over-promoted without support.

We established a permanent leadership team in children's services, with defined job titles.

We now have only 30 agency social workers. It has fallen over the past 18 months as agency staff have converted to permanent employees. Recruiting permanent staff is an ongoing process and we still have about 20 vacant posts. We have newly qualified social workers and those in their assessed year of practice and have good support packages in place, including four staff who work outside the line management structure who coach good practice. It is a friendly environment to work in and we're prioritising staff wellbeing.

The council has invested an additional £20m of funding but the expectation is we will use that money efficiently. We've put more resource into special education needs, early help and youth work provision. In April, we contributed £5.1m in efficiency savings through reducing agency spend, centralising functions and cutting duplication.

We have an efficiency target of £3.2m this year, but we're not going to get there. We're probably only going to make £500,000 of that due to a £2.7m overspend [on care costs]. We've seen a 17 per cent rise in the average cost of residential care since the start of the year. We've got ideas to use other forms of investment to create a city region residential care [system]. It would be ethical investment and we'd know what returns they expect.