Sefton Council's Cabinet asked to approve £2 million-plus of new roles over the next two years

Sefton Council’s Children’s Social Care department looks set to receive over £2 million worth of new roles over the next two years if approved at the Council’s Cabinet meeting next week (Thursday 2nd September) and supported by the financial strategy for 2022/23. The £2 million due to be spent on extra staff forms part of the £7 million investment approved by Full Council earlier this year.

The additional investment into Children’s Social Care is to improve the service and help deal with the unprecedented increase in demand, which has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is an additional step on Sefton’s Children’s Services’ improvement journey following an OFSTED visit in March 2021 which highlighted areas in need of improvement. Since March, a number of additional staff have been recruited, bolstered by a transformation team and support from the Department for Education.

Cllr Mhairi Doyle MBE, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, said:

“We have a committed and skilled workforce, dedicated to working on behalf of our children and I can assure families, children and young people across Sefton that we are determined to deliver to them the high-quality, responsive service they rightly expect and deserve from us.

“But the level of demand for our services is unlike anything we’ve known before, and with additional pressures from Covid-19, we recognise that improvements need to be made to Children’s Services in Sefton.

“We acknowledge the issues and challenges that OFSTED raised, and are committed to facing these head on. I am confident that the recruitment of these new posts to the Children’s Social Care team, in addition to external support from the Department of Education, will help ensure we make the improvements necessary to achieve better outcomes for children and families, and quickly. We need to make immediate improvements, and our existing staff need to see immediate relief in capacity and positive outcomes.

“We are aware of the need to focus on the management of the service and already have a new interim executive director of children’s social care and education and transformation team in place to drive the improvements.”

The agenda and papers for the meeting can be found at https://modgov.sefton.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=139&MId=10381