Tower Hamlets Council has tended to be in the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past five years. Former mayor Lutfur Rahman was removed from office in early 2015 after a long-running dispute over a breach of election rules. Just weeks later, three 15-year-old schoolgirls travelled to Syria to join Isis triggering concerns over safeguarding, and culminating in an "inadequate" rating for children's services in April 2017 after Ofsted concluded children were at risk of harm.
Catalyst for change
Despite the prevailing negative narrative around the council, the inadequate judgment came as a shock, says Debbie Jones, who joined as director of children's services (DCS), initially as an interim, in late 2015. However, it provided the catalyst for a two-year programme to recover the "good" rating that it had previously achieved for child protection services in 2012, supplemented with around £10m of additional funding from the council.
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