Cambs council told to improve their children's services

Ofsted's told the authority they must do better to become 'good'.

Bosses at Cambridgeshire County Council say they're dedicated to meeting improvements in their children's services.

The report, which follows a recent inspection explains "Senior leaders have now made an accurate self-assessment and have created strong foundations to drive practice improvement".

However, inspectors said that although since 2019 there had been no overall improvement in services for vulnerable children, they acknowledged that "evidence of concrete and significant improvement in recent months had taken place".

Councillor Bryony Goodliffe, Chair of Cambridgeshire County Council's Children and Young People's Committee said:

"Our focus has been on streamlining our processes and providing the right support and guidance for staff to enable them to support children and their families to make and sustain positive changes.

However, we know there is still a lot to do. Over the coming months we will continue to work closely with our staff, partners and the improvement board to ensure that children in Cambridgeshire achieve their best possible outcomes.

The report states that the director of children’s services and leadership team focused solely on Cambridgeshire and have added momentum to the positive change which is needed across children’s services.

We are on a journey of improvement and there has been a relentless focus on reducing staff turnover and creating a more stable workforce so that we can offer better outcomes for children and young people. Our culture has shifted to support staff to improve practice and we are delivering this through the new children’s academy, which supports learning and development within our children’s social worker and social care practitioner workforce".