Thank you for your interest in joining Solihull Council as our Director of Children’s Services.

Solihull’s challenges in Children’s Services are well documented.  In January 2023, a full ILACS inspection rated our children’s services as Inadequate across all judgements.  In November 2022, the Secretary of State for Education issued a statutory improvement direction and appointed a Children’s Commissioner.  In March 2023, the Children’s Commissioner recommended that we appoint an improvement partner for a period of up to three years.

Since this time, we have been on a rapid improvement journey and if you join us, the services that you will find are very different to those that inspectors saw in 2022.

Led by a new leadership team, we have systematically improved every part of children’s services, with a key focus on improving quality and embedding restorative practice in everything we do.

We have invested heavily in early help services to ensure children can remain with their families wherever possible. This has ranged from the successful launch of our multi-agency family hubs to dedicated edge of care services and our enhanced family group conference service.  This means that fewer children are now coming into care.  We have reduced our care population by 15% over the last 15 months and this reduction continues.

We have invested in our social work workforce to ensure all staff have manageable workloads.  Our staff talk positively about working for Solihull.

We expect our next ILACS inspection to take place in Autumn this year and our current DCS will be leaving us after the inspection.  You will work alongside our DCS to ensure a smooth handover, stability of leadership and that our improvement journey continues up to and beyond the inspection.

Beyond children’s services, you will find an experienced and supportive corporate leadership team, who recognise the importance of supporting Solihull children across all of our services.

You will be joining a borough filled with opportunities.  Solihull is one of the strongest performing economies in the UK and continues to be a place where people aspire to live, work and invest.  Our UK Central programme at Arden Cross, linked to HS2 is one of the country’s most strategically important development areas. We have significant redevelopment plans for three of our town centres, including Solihull town centre and have secured growth zone status in the north of the borough that will see us retaining business rates for investment, for 25 years.

Our population is changing, and we have good partnership arrangements with our colleagues in health and the police to respond to changing needs.  Like all local authorities, we are facing financial challenges, but we have a strong transformation programme in place, which aims to deliver key outcomes to assist with financial sustainability by the end of 2025/26. 

I hope that when you read the supporting information on our microsite you will be excited by the prospect of becoming our new Director of Children’s Services.  I look forward to receiving your application.