Disgraced children's '¨services'¨praised by inspectors

Inspectors have praised the efforts being made to transform children’s services at a council that previously failed thousands of vulnerable young people.

Rotherham Council was heavily criticised for its part in allowing largely Pakistan-heritage men to sexually abuse scores of children in the South Yorkshire town over the course of 16 years.

Reports published by both Professor Alexis Jay and Ofsted in 2014 painted a picture of weak leadership and poor communication with other agencies.

But today inspectors say the council is “making continuous progress in improving services for children in need of help and protection”.

In its second monitoring visit letter, Ofsted noted steady improvement in the council’s early help offer, swift action being taken to ensure children’s immediate safeguarding needs were identified and evidence of improvement in working with agencies including the police.

There was also praise for morale among “highly committed and motivated” staff.

Ian Thomas, Rotherham Council’s strategic director of Children and Young People’s Services, said: “In the last year we have introduced a hugely successful recruitment and retention scheme.

“We recognised the main issues facing social workers and tackled them head on. This has included a complete reorganisation of our offer – making smaller teams based in localities; better management structures and supervision and development opportunities. But the best thing we have done is to cut caseloads so now they are much more manageable and we monitor this on a daily basis.”

Work to inrease recruitment and retention of social workers has pushed the council above the national average, while co-locating professionals from different agencies was said to be helping break down previous communication barriers.

However, the number of the early help assessments by other agencies still remains low and inspects said this needed to change.

They also said more needed to be done to conduct police interviews with social workers present, in order to cut down the number of times a child has to tell their story.

Other areas for improvement include the quality of children’s plans and interventions, and data analysis.

Coun Gordon Watson, cabinet member for children’s services, said: “We welcome the findings and hope it helps turn around future ratings, but we need to remember we still have a long way to go as we are half way through a five year journey.”