The new Director of Childrens Services for Norfolk County Council is Sara Tough as this news report explains. Sara is due to move to this role from her current post as Director of Childrens Services in Dorset in October, when she will be the 6th Director at Norfolk in 4 years. To be fair the last two Directors were interim posts, one of whom only served two months and the other, someone i have met and know to be a first rate officer will have served for 9 months when Sara takes over. The Ofsted reports on Norfolk that took place in 2013 and then in October 2015 both rated the services inadequate so it will be interesting to find out how they are rated this Autumn or early next year as Sara takes over the running of the organisation. It is clearly disturbing that such a rating has been repeated and the morale of staff must have been impacted by these reports and the churn of senior leaders. The Chief Executive of the Council is reported to have said:

“Our ambition is to move up in the Ofsted rating from ‘inadequate’ to ‘requires improvement’ at the next inspection, which is expected later this year or early next year. We are committed to providing quality services for Norfolk’s children and their families. At the last monitoring visit, Ofsted noted that we are making sustained progress, there is good morale in the service and we are developing plans to address the issues identified by inspectors. Last month, Norfolk County Council announced it is launching a project with children’s charity Barnardo’s which will help it run its looked-after children services.”

It is noteworthy that prior to the plans for this project with Barnardo’s that the Council and Barnardo’s applied together for funding of £7M from the Government who turned them down. One of the ways of improving services is to help provide some initial funding and it is disappointing that the Council and the charity were refused this funding from the Government.

However the problems faced by Norfolk residents due to the weaknesses in their Council organisation are not unique. Another report that emerged in the same week as the first has listed 4 Councils for which the Government has decided to step in and recruit external commissioners to assist in the delivery of childrens services. The four Councils are the London Borough of Barnet along with Reading and Worcestershire and finally Kirklees. The report points out that the Kirklees situation appears from a few words in the article to be in a similar position to Norfolk with the new Director having only taken up her post in November. When she was appointed she was asked to produce a report by March regarding the best way forward and in June Leeds City Council had begun to provide assistance for the Council.

These five local authorities are part of 57 unitary authorities, 34 upper tier authorities and 32 London Boroughs. That amounts to 123 local councils that are responsible for childrens services. For 4% of these to be in such a parlous state as these two reports suggest should be ringing alarm bells across Parliament and the Government needs to explain why so many Councils are facing these challenges.