A LACK of highly qualified social workers is the "elephant in the room" for Bradford's beleaguered Children's Services department, a Councillor has claimed.

At the most recent meeting of Bradford Council's Children's Services Scrutiny Committee members heard that around one in four Level 3 Children's Social Worker roles in Bradford were currently being carried out by agency staff.

The Committee were getting an update on the Children's Services Improvement Programme - implemented after a damning Ofsted report into the department in 2018.

Ofsted carried out another visit late last year, and in a recent letter to the Council said while improvements had been made, there were still issues with the service, and the pace of improvement was too slow.

Marc Douglas, head of Children's Services, said: "What I can say is we've spent a lot of the last 18 months getting in place the right structure, and the right quality in place."

Explaining why improvement seemed slow, he told members that when he was brought in to Bradford Council in Summer 2019 he said it would take a minimum of three years for the service to move from inadequate to good.

He added: "It couldn't be fixed quickly due to the scale and complexity and the level of inadequacy they had identified. We're only half way through that time frame I set.

"Secondly, none of us at that stage knew we were going to have a pandemic."

Children's Services leaving some 'exposed to neglect for too long'

He said the Council's ability to recruit and retain "Level 3" social workers - with at least two years' experience, remained a "strategic challenge."

He added: "Around one in four of our established staff are agency workers. The average ratio of agency workers to permanent staff nationally is around one in five."

He said around 30 Level 2 social workers were due to move up to the be Level 3 workers in the coming weeks.

The meeting heard that the Covid pandemic had led to a rise in caseloads for the service.

Before the Pandemic the service was dealing with an average of 5,000 open cases. The figure was currently around 6,300.

And there are currently 1,300 children in Council care.

Councillor David Ward (Lib Dem, Bolton and Undercliffe) said: "There is an elephant in the room, it is not hidden in the corner, it is right in the middle, squashing many of the good initiatives that are taking place.

"I'm sure senior management are doing everything possible to put this right. But we need to know what is happening to put right the most important thing, and that is the staffing issue."

He said the Committee had requested more detail on the staffing problems facing the service, and what is being done to improve things, at the last meeting in January.

He pointed out that, due to the local election period, they would most likely not get a report with those details until July, adding: "That is six months without any information on the most important issue that is being reported to us.

"This elephant in the room is the most important thing. We need re-assurance that what you're doing is good and moving us in the right direction."

Mr Douglas said: "I'm not sure I agree with that analogy. I've been up front that this issue is a challenge and a strategic risk.

"I've been clear the challenge is significant. If it had been easy to fix the system the size of Bradford's we would have done it by now."