Celebrating diversity and making positive change

For those of us in local authority children’s services, it is an opportune time to reflect on the diversity of our own workforce, to celebrate progress and consider how to drive forward change in the future. As leaders of children’s services we are rightly challenged on how representative we are of the communities we serve and whilst we are seeing some progress it is too little and too slow.

I was keen to make this a priority focus for ADCS during my presidential year and work has been taking place to understand what more can be done to ensure we are a diverse and inclusive Association. A Working Group has been set up to bring clarity to ADCS’s role in this space by identifying where partners and individual ADCS members may be best placed to help move this agenda forward in children’s services. This will lead to a set of tangible actions we can take forward as an association to support change. We’re also in discussions with the LGA and ADASS too to learn, share and challenge each other in this regard.