‘Back-to-basics’ push pays off for children’s services
BOSSES ON TURNAROUND THAT SAW DEPARTMENT RATED ‘GOOD’
CHILDREN’S services in Manchester have been rated ‘good’ for the first time by inspectors thanks to a ‘backto-basics’ approach.
It’s the culmination of a huge turnaround from 2014 when Ofsted delivered a damning ‘inadequate’ verdict having found widespread and systemic failures.
Town hall bosses say the success is down to having social workers in the areas they serve to create ‘grassroots’ connections.
There are now fewer children coming into the council’s care as a proportion of the population and the number of repeat referrals to social workers has fallen.
Manchester has dedicated 2022 to children and young people as part of the ‘Our Year’ campaign – a bid to be recognised as a UNICEF Child Friendly City.
Labour councillor Garry Bridges, executive member for children and schools, said staff from other authorities now come to Manchester to see what they have done right.
He said: “People come and learn from Manchester – they send teams to learn from what we’re doing. They wouldn’t have done that eight years ago.”
The damning report in 2014 identified ‘widespread’ failures across the city. Ofsted found that managers had been aware of the problems with the huge backlog of cases and had taken some action – but it had not been enough.
By the time Paul Marshall became Manchester’s director of children’s services in 2016, there was already a plan of improvement which had been put in place, so there was no major restructure.
“I saw lots of serious incidents for children where the response was completely inadequate,” he said. “What that means for children and families is their lives are likely to get worse. And that’s what we saw.”
Consistently ranking at the top of child poverty tables, Manchester – one of the largest local authorities in the country – comes with its own unique challenges.
The size of the city alone makes it much harder to handle the volume of cases, but the complexity of those cases coming through creates further pressure.
In the context of budget cuts, many councils around the country became more centralised – closing district offices and pooling resources to save money.
But Manchester took a different approach, splitting the city into three areas – each the size of a more conventional council area in itself – with the town hall overseeing each locality.
Paul says social work teams in other areas often all work from one office, but that means losing the local connections and relationships required for the job.
A former social worker himself, he said the ‘grassroots’ relationships with local organisations such as volunteer groups and churches are crucial in this field.
“Traditional social work actually is a neighbourhood model,” he said. “You work with families and communities in their neighbourhoods. That’s one of the things that we’ve been active about promoting.”
At the same time, some services which had been commissioned to external organisations were brought in house, improving internal relationships too. The council also built ‘a team around the school’ within the education sector.
And these partnerships were particularly relied on during the pandemic when children were ‘less visible’ while staff were forced to work in different ways. Nevertheless, unlike in other local authorities, Manchester’s social workers continued visiting families throughout the pandemic despite restrictions.
Angela Platt, who has worked at Manchester council for 27 years, said the work done in the previous years ‘paid the dividends’ during the pandemic. “We knew who to contact,” she said. “We knew who our main contacts were in schools, surgeries, clinics, hospitals and we were able to do that fairly easily. Whereas if we hadn’t done that before, it would have been even more difficult.”
Sheryl Maisey, who is a leaving care service manager, says everybody got ‘stuck in’ during the coronavirus crisis which made the team even stronger. “Everybody just mucked in and it was really positive,” she said. “The ethos most of our teams had is we knew we needed to be out there for our most vulnerable young people. That’s what we’ve done.”