By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter
More apprentice social workers are expected to join Nottingham City Council’s workforce next year as it looks to improve its failing children’s services.
Education watchdog Ofsted rated the department at the Labour-run authority as ‘inadequate’ in 2022, because some children had been left at risk of harm.
A Government-appointed children’s improvement board, similar to the council’s current financial improvement board, is now ensuring critical changes are made.
Two Ofsted monitoring visits have taken place since the initial inspection, and while the watchdog noted “early signs of tangible improvements”, inconsistencies and staff shortages are still significant problems.
Sam Morris, head of children’s strategy and improvement at the council, gave an update on what the council is doing to improve further during a Children’s Partnership Board meeting on September 26.
She said the council has broadened its recruitment advertisements in a bid to draw in people from other parts of the country, and a social worker apprenticeship scheme will now be expanded into next year.
“As you will all be aware there is a national, live issue at the moment, where local authorities are struggling with recruitment and retention of social workers,” she said.
“So we have been working very closely with our HR department to look at revamping our recruitment and advertising campaigns.
“This year we created six apprenticeship social worker posts, they started in January, and we are in the process again of recruiting a further cohort of social worker apprentices to start again in January 2024.
“We have also looked at utilising agency staff where we have got vacancies.”
More staff members have been recruited to the missing children team, and a case management dashboard has been created so social workers can identify key tasks and managers can monitor performance.
“When children go missing there is a quicker, timelier response to go and see them and complete return to home interviews,” she added.
“We are seeing much timelier intervention, intervention being very focused which means there is less drift and delay for children on child in need plans.”
Consultancy firm Newton Europe is helping to deliver a transformation programme at a cost of roughly £6.5m, alongside specialist resourcing which comes at an additional cost of £2.4m.
Another monitoring visit is expected later this year, followed by three to four further visits next year.
Cllr Cheryl Barnard (Lab), the portfolio holder for children, said: “We were pleased with the outcome of the [latest] visit.
“We obviously do need to build on that consistency across our workforce but we heard some very encouraging feedback from inspectors.
“We’ll be getting another visit before the end of the year.
“One of the things they looked at in particular [was the number of children on child protection plans], because we have now got 100 less children on child protection plans.
“And usually what they would expect is the number of children on a child protection plan would go up after an inadequate grading, and ours has actually gone down.
“They looked carefully at that and they found it was fine, that we were protecting the right children with the right level of service. It was very encouraging to hear that.”
