SMALL improvements are being made month-by-month to improve permanent staffing levels in BCP Council’s children’s services, councillors have been told.

Members of the children’s services overview and scrutiny committee heard permanent staff turnover in social work positions was higher than neighbouring authorities and national averages.

BCP Council had a turnover rate of 36 per cent for full-time roles, compared to 15 per cent nationally, 17 per cent at Wiltshire Council, 16 per cent at Hampshire County Council and 13 per cent at Dorset Council.

Rachel Gravett, the local authority’s director for quality, performance improvement and governance, said developing a recruitment and retention strategy was key to long-term progress.

Ms Gravett told councillors the recruitment programme and strategy would improve the appointment of permanent social workers across all of children’s social care.

“We are making small improvements each month,” she said.

“It is a much bigger picture than just employing social workers each and every minute of the day.

“It is about tackling the recruitment and retention strategy that we have got so that we can retain and keep them as we move forward.”

Ms Gravett added: “It is the whole environment, it is not just pay that people want to do a social work job for. They come for a lot of other reasons as well.”

A report to the committee identified workforce stability, sickness, and data capability and reliability as areas of concern, with the latter point involving there still being two different HR and payroll systems since the councils merger in 2019.

Members heard that a paper had been submitted to the corporate management board detailing how the current pay structure was preventing the service from being competitive in the market and impeding the pace of improvement.

Councillor Sandra Moore said while she knew it was not all about money, it did help recruitment and retention.

“Having staff doing the same job but on different rates of pay is actually a recipe for causing problems and the same principle applies to the different IT systems,” Cllr Moore said.

“I know we are meant to be waiting for the transformation process and doing for staff as a whole across the council but given the situation in children’s services the sooner that something can be done because quite honestly it is really difficult for staff.”

The committee made reference to the feedback given to the council from Ofsted’s first monitoring visit since the inadequate rating for children’s service, which came after an inspector in December last year.

Inspectors focused the visit in June on the department’s front door service, where they found there was still a “churn of temporary staff”.

Scrutiny committee chair Cllr Richard Burton asked what Ofsted would see as stable levels of staffing.

Ms Gravett said “Everybody who I work with is committed to seeing children’s services through this improvement journey and beyond.

“No promises but everybody sat around that table is very enthused, very engaged and very committee to BCP to take it forward through the improvement journey.”

She added: “They were very pleased with the fact we had permanent leadership in post, so I think they are very encouraged by the permanency and as they attend the monitoring visits as we go through our improvement journey and we are all still here and we are all still making the improvements they want to see, they will support that as a stable workforce going forward.”

The committee was told all of the service manager posts in children’s services had been recruited bar one, with interviews held for this position on July 25.