Welcome to the West Midlands Regional Page
Joint Chairs: Barbara Peacock, DCS, Sandwell & Gail Quinton, DCS, Worcestershire
Update from the 2010/11 Annual Report
During 2010/2011 we refocussed our regional priorities and the West Midlands ADCS Network took on the role of the Children and Young People’s Forum as the key strategic body in the region. The West Midlands have identified a series of priority themes, to mirror national ADCS themes, for action in 2011 onwards.
Our key successes this year include:
- Commissioning – we can now evidence savings of £5million for our work with providers on price increases and this project is going from strength to strength as we bring in new areas such as SEN and Social Work Agencies.
- Teenage Pregnancy – we published a report and DVD in September 2010 entitled Growing Up Young. This has been a huge success in the region, and has been successfully rolled out to schools.
- Succession Planning – we have established a successful succession planning programme for second and third tier officers, called My Leadership Future which will take place from April to September 2011
Our safeguarding programme continues to be a priority area and the following elements of our work programme have shown progress:
- The Safeguarding Awards in April 2010 were a huge success in rewarding good practice and innovation in improving outcomes for children and young people
- We have rolled out the social care improvement pilot to Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Stoke-on-Trent following the completion of a successful pilot in Coventry
- The SCIE systems approach to learning from Serious Case Reviews is drawing to completion as a regional pilot, and wider dissemination is being planned
- We are actively learning lessons from the Social Work Recruitment and Retention Pilot which has been running across the West Midlands, and we intend to implement at least one of the pilots.
The West Midlands ADCS Group has continued to meet regularly (approximately bi-monthly) supported by IEWM. Priorities for the ADCS meetings have included, in addition to the above, efficiencies and budget pressures and increase in social care referrals.
We have also held the third ADCS Regional Conference for the wider network in September 2010. This was extremely well attended, with significant buy-in from colleagues to drive forward regional and local activity.
We also have ADCS representatives on national committees, at director or assistant director level, and we contribute to national policy developments and participate in activities on a proactive basis.
This year we again saw changes in senior roles as the Local Authorities look at integrating into People Directorates. We have seen changes in the make up of senior leaders in the region; we welcome Eleanor Brazil (Birmingham), Jo Davidson (Herefordshire), Sally Rees (Staffordshire), David Taylor (Shropshire) and Barbara Peacock (Sandwell). As the role of the Director of People becomes more prevalent we also welcome Sarah Norman (Wolverhampton) into the network. We said goodbye to Roy Lockwood (Wolverhampton), Julia Almond (Telford) and Tony Howell (Birmingham), David Sanders (Herefordshire) and we also continue to send good wishes to Mark Wyatt (Dudley) and Lesley Heale (Solihull) for their health to improve. Our thanks goes to IEWM for their regional input which allows much of our work to be driven forward.
Finally we are grateful to Marion Davis for her leadership of ADCS over the last year.