But this looks set to alter as last week's Commission for Social CareInspection report revealed that change is taking place (Children Now,5-11 October). For the first time, Birmingham has been judged as servingsome children well and although inspectors say there is still more todo, the council's capacity for improvement is rated as promising.
This might explain why Peter Hay, strategic director of social care andhealth, is so frank about the past. "It was a fairly comprehensivebreakdown," he says. "Management in the directorate had clearly not beengood, but equally practice was poor."
He even agrees that the state of case files showed staff didn't careabout people, they couldn't even write to them in a civil tone.
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