Nottingham City Council says that efforts to improve its children's services after an inadequate Ofsted rating are being "hampered" by a nationwide shortage of social workers. An inspection report published in September said that several improvements were needed in the children's services being offered in Nottingham, particularly around the safeguarding of children.
Ofsted said that Nottingham City Council were leaving "too many children with insufficient protection", with some of those meeting the threshold for social care intervention waiting for up to six weeks to be seen. Government commissioners could have been sent in to run Nottingham's children's services in the wake of that report, but the city council has avoided this for now.
Instead, the Department for Education will commission an independent chairperson to sit on a board which will monitor the city council's progress. Ofsted will eventually re-inspect but before then, inspectors will carry out around six monitoring visits in Nottingham.
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The council will also be submitting its final improvement plan to Ofsted next month. But at a meeting of the council's children and young people scrutiny committee on Thursday (November 3), council officials explained that they were facing some challenges during the improvement process.
Labour councillor Cheryl Barnard, the portfolio holder for children, young people and schools at the city council, said: "Frontline staff are absolutely buzzing with the improvements that have been made, they feel they're on top of work now. Staff morale is really good, they understood that this judgement wasn't about them and their work, it was more about the system that they're working within.
"But improvement has been hampered by the shortage of social workers and a lot of the churn is from the agency social workers that we've got. We were at a national conference yesterday and everyone said that that's the problem they're facing - the recruitment and retention of staff and how that hampers progress."
A separate Ofsted report published in July examined the shortage of social workers across the country. It found that more social workers were leaving local councils, with many of them moving into agency work.
The report said: "Agencies often have appealing contracts, with greater flexibility and higher pay than local authorities can offer. As a result, agencies are outcompeting local authorities for staff from a limited pool of workers.
"Shortages in staff mean that local authorities have to rely on agency workers, which increases their costs and undermines stability for children. Consistent relationships are important for children and their families, and frequent changes in social workers can contribute to a sense of abandonment for these children."
Ailsa Barr, the director for Children's Integrated Services at Nottingham City Council, said that providing more stability for children by having more permanent staff was a key issue being tackled. She said: "A recruitment and retention package was agreed just before Ofsted arrived for our social workers and the intention of that was to stabilise and to bring us to a position where we can reduce our demand on agency workers."
Councillors attending the meeting said they were not yet clear on what the improvement plan was for children's services, although officials said that they were still working on drawing the final version of that up ahead of the December deadline. Ofsted raised eight specific areas for improvement in its inspection report this year, including on the oversight of children who are missing from education and on a sufficient number of places being available for children in care.
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