Education

Debbie Jones: ‘My team of experts got children’s services off the naughty step’ | David Brindle


When Ofsted inspectors branded children’s services in Tower Hamlets “inadequate” two years ago, Debbie Jones seemed hoist by her own petard. She had become director responsible for services at the then troubled east London council after leaving Ofsted, where she had controversially made the inspection model much tougher.

Jones, 69, can now claim vindication: having stood her ground in the face of that damning verdict, and having been backed by the council’s leaders, her two-year turnaround of her department resulted this week in a “good” Ofsted rating and a glowing report describing the achievement as “remarkable”.

When she arrived at Tower Hamlets in 2015, initially as an interim appointee, the council’s new mayor, John Biggs, was rebuilding the authority’s credibility after scandals that resulted in the government sending in commissioners to take over core functions.

Children’s services – rated “good with outstanding features” by Ofsted in its previous inspection in 2012 – was not then considered a problem area, but Biggs wanted to decouple it from adult social care with which it had been jointly run.

Jones soon began to uncover poor practice. “When you started to look, the worms came out in multitudes,” she recalls. “If you look back at the statistics, we were very proud of the fact that we kept kids out of care and we had good preventative services in place. But we were not taking into care the children we should have been. It was a very inward-looking authority.”

When Ofsted delivered its “inadequate” rating, she admits it still came as a “huge shock”. But she won the agreement of Biggs and Tower Hamlets’ chief executive Will Tuckley to carry out a 24-month programme to get back to “good”. The council had already committed an additional £4.8m a year for children’s services, recognising past under-investment, but now put about the same again into a short-term “improvement pot” and set up an improvement oversight board chaired by Sir Alan Wood, who had revamped services in neighbouring Hackney.

“We stripped everything – and I mean everything – back to basics,” says Jones. “I had an exceptionally good interim team: they were experts, they were rottweilers, they were experienced in work with other authorities that had been on the naughty step.”

The council’s existing child protection model was ditched in favour of the acclaimed Leeds model of early engagement with families in crisis. Many existing staff left: at one stage of the transformation process, temporary agency workers were filling 78% of public-facing roles.

Use of agency staff is now greatly reduced, if not eliminated, and the workforce is much more settled. Turnover of social workers fell from 33% in June last year to below 9% this May – about half the London-wide rate – and Ofsted found morale high. “Staff want to work in Tower Hamlets and many agency staff are converting to permanent contracts,” it reports. This, Jones points out, includes the entire emergency duty team.

What now? With the pot of improvement money coming to an end later this year, Jones – who shows no sign of slowing down despite being at an age when most of her peers are enjoying the fruits of their careers in retirement – is starting the process of negotiating what she calls a “realistic” budget for 2020-21. This will need to account for the borough’s booming population, up an estimated 19% since the 2011 census when it was counted as 69% minority ethnic, for its high poverty rate and for spiralling demand for special needs and disability support. Jones reports the latter up 45% by spending in four years and calls it “the big one” in her budget projections.

She will also be budgeting for the costs of dealing with teenagers caught up in gang culture and knife crime, sometimes needing to move them or their families out of the area. Together with so-called jihadi brides and misreported fostering controversies, it’s an issue that has put Tower Hamlets regularly in the news.

“We’re always on the front pages, often for things we don’t want to be but increasingly for the good stuff,” says Jones. “It’s an iconic borough. It gets under your skin.”

She still shows all the appetite for the job, and the ideas and energy of someone decades younger. Jones says: “Being a director of children’s services has always been the love of my life.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 69.

Family: Married, two sons, four grandchildren

Lives: London (weekdays); Banbury, Oxfordshire (weekends).

Education: Copthall county grammar school, Barnet, north London; Nottingham University (BA sociology); Aston University (MSc public sector management); Bedford College University of London (CQSW).

Career: 2015-present: corporate director for children and culture, Tower Hamlets; 2013-15: national director for social care and regional director for London, Ofsted; 2010-13: director of children’s services, Lambeth; (2012-13: president, Association of Directors of Children’s Services); 2007-10: director of children’s services, Luton; 2006-07: assistant director, then interim director of children’s services, Stoke-on-Trent; 2001-06: assistant director of social services, Durham; 1998-2001: assistant director of social services, Slough; 1994-98: secondment to Department of Health to develop child protection and childcare practice; 1990-94: social work manager, Oxfordshire; 1988-90: lecturer, Mid-Warwickshire College; 1984-88: social work manager, Warwickshire; 1975-84: social worker, Oxfordshire; 1972-74: unqualified social worker, Southwark.

Interests: Theatre, grandparenting.



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