PRESS RELEASE: OFSTED REPORT on SANDWELL CHILDREN’S SERVICES

OFSTED Report on Sandwell’s Children’s Services

 

UNISON is today publically expressing concerns at how Children’s Services in Sandwell are run.

 

For some time members in Sandwell have internally expressed their concerns and raised these through the appropriate internal channels but today in light of the OFSTED report there has become a need to speak up about it.

 

For the last 18 months Sandwell UNISON raised professional concerns with the high thresholds introduced through the restructure implemented by the private company ‘iMpower’, which meant Sandwell’s Children Services risked not helping all the children it should.

 

The failure to permanently imbed improvements has been a frustration for our members for over a decade. We hope the Council ends its links with the private company ‘iMpower’, which has failed to deliver for Sandwell despite them charging over £1million to achieve such a poor Ofsted report.

 

Tony Rabaiotti, UNISON West Midlands Regional Manager said:

 

“Social workers in Sandwell work very hard day in and day out to provide high quality services to the children of the borough and their families.

 

It is a shame that OFSTED do not seem to have recognised this, it is almost as if they wish the borough to be ‘inadequate’”

 

UNISON believes we and our members can play an important part in turning this service around and we look forward to a time when there is a constructive management team, who we can work together with, to make the improvements that both the workers and children of Sandwell so desperately deserve.

ENDS

 

 

Permanent link to this article: http://www.sandwellunison.co.uk/press-release-ofsted-report-on-sandwell-childrens-services/