Welcome to the Eastern Regional Page
Eastern Regional Chair: Lisa Christensen, DCS, Norfolk
Update from the 2010/11 Annual Report
There has been quite a bit of change in personnel over the past year. Adrian Loades became DCS in Cambridgeshire, Martin Pratt in Luton, Dave Hill in Essex and Sue Cook, on an interim basis, in Southend.
We have continued to meet on a quarterly basis, although we have given up our social dinner and overnight stay in the interest of efficiencies.
We have continued to operate our regional networks aligned to the ADCS policy committees, with each area having a DCS that sponsors this work and reports back into the DCS group.
Last summer we held our third annual day conference for all our senior management teams across the region, along with colleagues from health, which we used to take stock of our national changes and plan for ‘children’s services mark II’.
We have continued to make good use of funding from the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) to support the second year of a major investment in a programme to improve safeguarding across the region, which is having positive outcomes including a regional website of practice; peer reviews; and specific projects targeting improvement priorities in each authority.
We are enthusiastically engaging in our regional succession planning programme, supported by Virtual Staff College (VSC).
The collaboration and mutual support between authorities across the region has resulted in more sharing of practice between authorities, for example including exchange visits by senior management teams.
In February Paul Greenhalgh moved on to another DCS role outside the region and Lisa Christensen took up the role of regional chair.