For most people, Manchester conjures up images of one of the world'smost famous football teams, an energetic live music scene and some ofthe best universities in the country.
Alongside these many highlights, however, are some low points too. Forinstance, official statistics compiled in 2004 found that Manchester wasranked as the third most deprived district across the whole ofEngland.
As the city's director of children's services, Pauline Newman sees thetwo sides of what is arguably the capital of the North. "This is anenvironment with lots of deprivation but it is also one of the mostvibrant environments to live in," she explains.
"The city is now a major capital of sport, culture, music, and shopping'so it has an enormous buzz." As a result, she argues, Manchester is oneof the most compelling locations for anyone who is looking for achallenge in children's services.
Newman, who started her career as a social worker, joined Manchester in2002 from Coventry to take up the post of director of social services,overseeing adults and children's social care. In 2003, she moved to headup the children and families' social care department before taking upher current post in April last year.
Throughout her career, Newman has worked in urban environments, whichmakes her particularly suited to dealing with the challenges inManchester.
She says: "If you are the kind of person who has a mission aboutchildren and outcomes, what you could deliver is enormous - you can bepart of transforming a whole generation."
Transformation is perhaps the best word to use when describing the stateof the city's children's services. For instance, the council has devotedtwo-thirds of its annual budget to children's services, includingschools. And the latest Commission for Social Care Inspection andOfsted's Annual Performance Assessment shows that things are moving inthe right direction.
Continual improvement
Although the local authority's children and young people's social careservices and its children's services only achieved two marks, out of apotential four, its overall capacity to improve achieved a three(Children Now, 7 December 2005-3 January 2006).
However, Newman and her team aren't resting there, as one of the nextchallenges in staffing terms is finding the 572 staff required for thechildcare places that will be created by the fast-moving children'scentres programme.
Newman reveals that, apart from offering a good relocation package andinduction programme that includes two weeks with a zero case load backedup by a "generous" starting salary, her efforts to fill vacancies areprimarily focused on potential local recruits. "We're trying to recruitthem from Manchester itself to establish people who will stay in thecity," she says.
Keeping current staff is also a key strategy. "Retention is an enormouspriority as we want to grow our own. It's not so much about lookingoutwards - although we do try to learn from places like Tower Hamlets,which has a similar deprivation profile to us, and from neighbouringauthorities that are high performers, like Knowsley. But this departmenthas some incredibly committed staff - our chief executive, for example,has been with us for 30 years."
For that reason, efforts have been made recently to improve staffsupport.
In fact, Newman admits that "significant vacancies" in 2003 forced thedepartment to rethink how it dealt with this issue. One of the lessonsher long career has taught her, she says, is that the workforce shouldalways be in dialogue with managers about problems. "I still havesix-monthly social worker focus groups where I try things out becauseyou may often feel you've cracked certain areas but you might find thatstaff are saying something quite different," she explains.
"If you don't know how things are going on the ground, and you have ahuge churn of staff or are relying heavily on agency workers, continuitygoes out the window and planning becomes more difficult."
Award-winning work
Such efforts have included the award of Investors in People status forthe department in December. "The award was one thing, but I was keen onwhat it had done internally and how it had affected all of us," addsNewman.
"People worked hard but were supported in order to achieve it."
For Newman, working in Manchester is a fantastic opportunity for anyonekeen to make a difference in the lives of children. "Meeting ourrecruitment needs is not easy but we have a massive Sure Startchildren's centre programme, so we get all the funding for initiativesthat we need," she concludes.
"What's more, staff here say that this is the best time we have ever hadto achieve outcomes."
CASE STUDY - Housing solution for children's services workers
Like most major cities, Manchester offers a range of housing that forthe most part can be expensive, especially for key workers such asteachers, nurses and social workers. To combat this problem, ManchesterCity Council opened The Apple Building in August last year.
A former council housing block that was renovated in partnership with aprivate company, the building was primarily designed to be a way ofretaining staff. As a result, the project offers high-qualityaccommodation for young professionals, with a focus on teachers inManchester's schools and those in children's services.
Tenants, the rules stipulate, should have a salary commensurate withthose of newly or recently qualified teachers. And Newman says thatalthough teachers were the first beneficiaries of the project, newchildren's services workers are also eligible to rent the apartments asthey are now available to all of Manchester City Council'semployees.
INNOVATION CENTRE
Stockport council is operating a work trial programme to encouragepeople who have problems entering the job market to work in its childrenand young people's directorate. Most requests to date have come throughPure Innovations, an organisation that specialises in helping peoplewith disabilities or disadvantages to gain employment.
Manchester City Council has launched a project aimed at inspiring youngpeople to consider a career in social care. The initiative has recruitedsocial care professionals to run presentations and workshops in schoolsacross the city and is now offering work experience placements to Year10 students.
Liverpool City Council is developing a programme to recruit more youngpeople, including into children's services, as it tackles the shortageof young recruits in its workforce. One strand of the strategy is thatthe council will offer children in care the opportunity to job shadowindividuals as part of a business mentoring scheme and prioritiselooked-after children when applications are received for workexperience.
As part of its current recruitment strategy for children's socialworkers, Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council is offering a 2,000extra payment in the first month to new recruits. The council is lookingto fill a number of posts in its children's division, including teamleader/unit manager, family support workers and children's socialworkers.
Foster carers working for Manchester council are being offeredincentives to complete a post-approval learning and developmentprogramme. The Manchester children's service Payment for Skillsinitiative offers carers an additional 50 a week for completionof a post-approval programme and 100 a week extra on completionof a Level 3 NVQ in health and social care.
RECRUITMENT CENTRE
Organisation: Salford City Council children's services
Campaign: Looking towards a brighter future
Agency: Euro RSCG Riley
Campaign aims
Salford is a city of 220,000 people situated on the doorstep ofManchester, which is widely regarded as the capital of the North. Havingrecently achieved a three star rating for its children's service, you'dexpect the council to be facing relatively few challenges when it comesto recruiting children and families professionals. However, as theSalford's principal human resources advisor Iris Newton explains: "Likeall local authorities, we struggle to recruit, especially social workersand people working with children and families."
With this in mind, the council has adopted a different approach torecruitment.
It decided to develop a strategy with a number of elements that wouldaim, at one level, to "position Salford in the minds of people when theyare considering leaving their current job," according to Newton, and, onanother, to demonstrate its confidence in existing staff.
The solution
When the council met with its advertising agency, Euro RSCG Riley'several storyboards were presented. After consideration, Newton says theteam chose the ad that best "reflected the strong brand image we want toproject for Salford, highlighting its energy and redevelopment".
This meant the recruitment campaign would follow in the spirit of thecity's major rebrand in June last year, entitled One Shocking City,which aimed to demonstrate that Salford has more to offer than people atfirst think. So one of the key features of the new approach torecruitment was to use a specially commissioned image of the strikingLowry Building against a magenta backdrop, which had become thecouncil's brand colour.
This image has been used in a number of ways. One of most important ofthese saw it appear in Black women's magazine Pride. A two-page featurelooked at the working lives of the department's Black staff and carrieda recruitment ad in the following pages. "This not only helped to raiseour profile but also showed our staff that every team member is valuableto us," believes Newton.
Advertising has also been developed to be adaptable to many targetmarkets.
For instance, qualified staff in Northern Ireland have been targeted andthe web site is used to encourage potential candidates to consider thebenefits of relocating to the city.
But, as Newton points out: "There are no magic answers to recruitment."As a result, alongside these strategies are others like the strong tiesdeveloped by the department with Salford University's social work degreecourse.
The future
"Our recruitment strategy has been to turn things around at Salford andfocus on retention," says Newton. "Like many other local authorities wehave a significant number of vacancies and have found it difficult tofind high-quality recruits. So, in the future, we feel it's veryimportant to concentrate on retaining the staff we already have."
