SOCIAL WORK & CHILDREN’S SERVICES
Creative thinking to take children’s services forward: interview with Alan Wood
Alan Wood, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, gives his thoughts on how local authorities can attempt to safeguard child social care in the future. David Stevenson reports.
W
ithout creativity and imagination in the delivery of children’s social services,
councils will face a stark choice: cutting ‘preventative’ services, or cutting yet more money from elsewhere in their already squeezed budgets.
This is according to Alan Wood, president at the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), who told PSE that safeguarding children’s social services will likely consist of a combination of what “councils have done thus far to protect the core child protection services”, while also seeing what protection they can get through “thinking differently about how the services are provided”.
However, he conceded that there isn’t much room for manoeuvre in many local authorities on what remains a very difficult issue.
Good governance and organisation
Wood, who is also the corporate director of Children and Young People’s Services in the London Borough of Hackney, isn’t a believer that just spending money will generate the best results in children’s social care services, especially where failings have happened in the past.
“I don’t think it is that straightforward. You can see this in some areas that are not doing very well,” he said. “One of the things [inspectors] have found is that the dysfunctionality or disorganisation of those services tends to
28 | public sector executive Oct/Nov 14
“Originally, the construct was very clear for a director: this is where the buck stopped. As the director of children’s services, you were the person who had the statutory responsibility for services. And, although you didn’t manage them, the duty on those in health, probation and in the police to partner and co-operate with the director indicated that you had strong central governance,” said Wood.
“I think what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is a weakening of that by the creation of new bodies and the creation of new posts in regional and central government.
bring with it inefficiencies. People have tried to resolve problems by perhaps throwing more money at it, and appointing people to posts, but not really thinking through what the core problems are causing the difficulty.”
Organisations with weak management need to address it urgently. Leaving ineffective managers in charge of social work can be a costly mistake, for the local authority and for children.
Back in 2013, Wood (pictured, right) was asked by Michael Gove, then the secretary of state for education, to review the arrangements for children’s social care in Doncaster.
He told PSE that one component of driving forward changes is strong governance. But over the last decade, there has been a weakening of the role of director of children’s services.
“For instance, we’ve ended up having a director of children’s services, then a regional school commission, an Ofsted inspector for schools, then the independent chair of the local safeguarding boards, then the principal social worker for each authority. I think, in a way, the response to the various challenges has created additional structures and additional governance arrangements, which can cloud over the clear centrality of having a director of children’s social services where the buck stops.”
New thinking Unprecedented budget cuts have prompted
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