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Children’s services need “significant extra resource” to tackle mounting risks
18/03/2022
Three of the largest risks relate to the care of vulnerable children
by Andy Mitchell, Local Democracy Reporter
Surging demand for children’s services in Oxfordshire that has led to more than £2million worth of overspend still needs “significant extra resource”.
Councillor Liz Brighouse OBE (Lab, Churchill & Lye Valley), deputy leader and cabinet member for children, education and young people’s services at Oxfordshire County Council, fired the warning as a report revealed the authority’s three largest risks relate to the care of vulnerable children.
Service demand, recruiting and keeping children’s social workers and “insufficient placement availability for children we care for” have been highlighted.
The council’s business management and monitoring report, which offers councillors a regular overview of how the county is performing, said just under 24,000 children had been referred over concerns for their welfare in the past 10 months. That is 20 per cent higher than at the same point in 2020-21, a year that saw referrals shoot up by more than a third.
Seven new staff were drafted in at a cost of £430,000 to boost the number of early help assessments carried out but the number of children in care is also up “as backlogs still exist in the court process”, slowing down the volume that can leave.
Child protections plans, put in place when children are deemed to be at risk of significant harm, are up by almost a quarter, while a backlog of education, health and care plans continues to build due to extra volume and a lack of professionals to conduct them with “a particular pressure on the availability of educational psychologists”.
Cllr Brighouse said: “We are working hard to try to make a difference but we have risks around the large number of children that are being referred for mental health services.
“What is happening to our children is really very worrying. We need to make sure we have the resources in place and start looking at, for instance, early help and how we can work with families, children and young people in order to support them.
“That is happening. We are looking at growing and getting our own social workers because the workforce issues are enormous around the care of children.
“We are working on all of this but it is going to take significant extra resource in order for us to meet the needs of these children and young people to make sure they are safe. We have already committed to building our own children’s homes in the county so we don’t have out-of-county boarding.
“We have heard recently about the large sums of money going out of local authority budgets to fund private residential care homes for vulnerable children, the cost of that and also the profits of those organisations is another issue we really need to tackle, probably alongside other people.
“I think we need to look at all of these things and how Oxfordshire as one of the wealthiest counties in England can actually make sure that we don’t have the lives of our children as the biggest risk on our register.”
Published: by Banbury FM Newsteam