Staff buy-in aids service recovery

Ofsted pulled few punches when it delivered its verdict on children’s safeguarding arrangements in Sandwell back in January 2010. Inspectors branded the West Midlands authority inadequate in all but two areas of work and highlighted failures in how it analysed safeguarding need. In the wake of the inspection the government placed the authority on an improvement notice.

The shock of these events was still in evidence when Barbara Peacock, the council’s corporate director of people, took charge of children’s services that September. “People were in a very different place,” she recalls. “There was a core of staff who didn’t believe the authority should have got an improvement notice. Another set were hugely disappointed, upset and distraught that the good work they thought they had been doing had been deemed inadequate. Another set were frozen and did not know what to do.”

Signs of recovery
The improvement notice also prompted some to jump ship, leaving Sandwell with some hard-to-fill vacancies. But two years on, the green shoots of recovery are in evidence. A follow-up inspection in January found a service on the road to recovery that was performing adequately across the board.

Back in September 2010, this recovery had to begin with the basics. First Peacock had to get staff to understand why the service had failed. She says that while this was necessary it was crucial not to forget that good work exists. “It’s really important to never forget that there are some talented workers and very good pieces of work even in the most challenging circumstances,” she says.

Another early target was the contact and referral system, which Ofsted’s latest report said had improved significantly. “People didn’t know how to make a referral to children’s social care if they felt a child was at risk,” says Peacock. “I felt it was the basic, bare minimum that any service had to have.”

Sandwell had also become too focused on a numbers-driven approach to performance management – an approach that meant the service lost sight of the people it was working with. Now the views of frontline staff, children and their families feed into the council’s performance management system, giving a human dimension to the usual quantitative data.

Peacock says this change in management culture is reflected in child protection conferences, which are now significantly more timely and child-focused. “We’ve also raised the profile of conferences with other agencies,” she says. “Interestingly, a few families are now saying: ‘When can we have our child protection conference? We want our say’.”

Recruitment is still an issue though. Sandwell now has clear career paths and a programme for newly qualified social workers, but it is having to offer £5,000 “golden hellos” to get the team managers and senior practitioners it needs. “While our newly qualified social workers are real stars, they won’t be ready to step into those roles for a while yet,” says Peacock. “So we have to do something to get people to help us take the service forward to good and excellent.”

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