Children's services improving after 'inadequate' rating - but work still to be done

Data to the end of August shows the fall for the most serious cases, compared to at the end of July, but statistics also reveal more children in Dorset are coming into contact with social services – with 875 open to early help services compared to 839 in July.

The statistics also illustrate the pressure on the workforce with social workers holding an average of more than 17 cases, compared to the target of 15, with some workers having more than 20 cases. Only 41 per cent of supervision sessions between managers and social workers are completed on time because of the demands of day to day work. The figures show that 25.6 per cent of social worker posts are vacant in the Dorset County Council area with more than one in ten posts being held by agency social workers, who usually cost the authority more than their own staff.

The report also admits that there are ongoing problems with a new Mosaic computer system to track work with families, introduced last year, including complete outages, both planned and unplanned.

Of the children who are looked after by the Dorset County Council 173 are placed more than 20 miles from home.

An improvement plan report to the county’s safeguarding scrutiny committee says that, overall, services are improving with its own audit tool judging that between July and August the service went from an ‘inadequate’ rating to ‘requires improvement’. However director of children’s services, Nick Jarman, says that the same level of change would need to be maintained for at least three months to move from the current ‘inadequate’ finding.

He told the committee that during the year he had been in post the standards the service needed to reach for Ofsted inspection purposes had been raised.

Work on the service improvement plan started in June with the process overseen by a monthly board meeting which included not only social services staff but partner organisations, such as the police.