Top Tory welcomes service turnaround

Sunderland Tory leaders have welcomed news that the city children’s services have been given a clean bill of health.

An Ofsted report released on Friday, August 20, rates the the city as “outstanding”, just three years after it was graded “inadequate”.

Sunderland is the first local authority in the country to go from the worst possible rating to the best in the course of a single inspection cycle.

Council Conservative leader Coun Antony Mullen is an educational researcher and a member of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board.

“I warmly welcome the news that children’s services social care provision in Sunderland has been rated Outstanding by Ofsted,” he said.

“The Ofsted report makes explicit that this achievement is down to Jill Colbert, the Director of Together for Children, and her staff, ably supported by the Council’s Chief Executive.

“In previous years, Ofsted has said that children in Sunderland were not properly safeguarded and that they were put at risk of harm and radicalisation.

"Children died whilst in the council’s care and to forget that would be an insult to those the local authority failed.

“It has taken the intervention of government and the removal of responsibility from the council’s direct control to get us to where we are now, but all across the political spectrum should welcome this news and hope for the continued success of Jill and her team,” Coun Mullen went on to tell the Echo.