In early 2014, the tri-borough councils in London became one of the first areas to benefit from the Department for Education's £100m, two-year Children's Social Care Innovation Fund.
A report by MPs published this month called for the government to take an extra 3,000 child refugees from Syria currently stranded in makeshift camps in mainland Europe.
It is rare for the sacking of a director of children's services (DCS) to be played out in public, but that has been the case in Somerset over the past week.
Last Friday, the Reading Post published a story about how children's services in the town received only one application for each of the three senior social worker jobs it advertised. On the same day, the Coventry Telegraph reported that 30 demonstrators had gathered outside the city's town hall calling for more action to be taken against the agencies involved in the Daniel Pelka case.