As families are struggling with the impact of poverty, the Isle of Wight Council is seeing an increase in referrals to its children’s services team.
The area director for the authority, Kim Goode, said at points the number of referrals had reached unprecedented levels.
In March this year, 27 children were put on children protection plans, which Ms Goode told the Isle of Wight Council’s children’s services scrutiny committee on Thursday was unusually high.
The service as a whole was operating at a 15 to 20% higher rate than before the pandemic, she said.
After analysis, Ms Goode said referrals were coming through due to families starting to feel the impact of COVID, poverty, rising fuel costs and increased food prices.
Families are struggling to maintain their daily lives, she said, and new families with new problems have entered the system.
Spikes in referrals are also seen, Ms Goode said, after national reviews into children’s deaths, like the recent Arthur Lambinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson cases, are completed.
The authority had hoped referral numbers would plateau or come down but that has not been the case. However, the higher referrals did not mean, Ms Goode said, there is a higher number of children coming into the system permanently.
While there was increased demand, good performances had been sustained and the ability to assess children remained strong.
The Isle of Wight Council has funnelled more money into the service to employ more social workers but, regionally and nationally, Ms Goode said there was a challenge in recruitment and the positions have not been filled. According to the council’s job vacancies page, among other empty roles in children’s services, there are four social worker positions in the children’s assessment safeguarding teams alone.
A joint piece of work is being done with adult social care to refresh the council’s recruitment strategy and conversations are taking place to review the pay scales of workers. Ms Goode said the work would be done to make the pay scales more attractive as the Isle of Wight Council cannot compete with some of the other local authorities.
The authority has heavily relied on agency staff but are still finding it difficult to fill positions due to the increased demand elsewhere and the competitive workforce.
Poverty by definition is the state of being extremely poor. As the UK has a social safety net of benefit payments and countless other services provided to benefit claimants for free, then no one in the uk is in poverty.
once again it is an example of leeches expecting the state to do the parenting, as well as pay for their upkeep.
not one of these so called poverty cases, will be without a mobile phone, access to a steady stream of booze and baccy, as well as 24 hour on demand TV entertainment.
Please get your head out of your arse
stop being a sponger then.
Nurse! Nurse!
He’s out of bed again!!!
burdensome leeches, living off the rest of us – and you mugs are supporting it
nice to see all the benefit claimants voting my posts down – well they would, wouldn’t they
Or maybe they are just decent people who care about their fellow humans?
You do like your stereotypes, don’t you Wighter? Let’s put the boot on the other foot, shall we?
isle of wighter: Late 50s to mid 70s, buzz cut hair, beer gut, red face, drives an SUV, Brexit / Farage / Trump supporter, climate change denier, xenophobe, thinks women should know their place and that place is in the kitchen cooking his dinner. Supports Free speech as long as it’s him doing the speaking, anti-vaxxer, comfortably off in his retirement bungalow with triple-linked pension but happy to receive the winter fuel payment even though he doesn’t need it.
Bet I got about 3/4 of that right, didn’t I?
No?
Well maybe knee-jerk stereotypes aren’t so great, because that’s exactly how you sound in your posts.
you don’t know isle of wighter, however, I do…and you couldn’t be further from the truth
Funny, that, because the image that pops into my mind when wighter posts his usual far right invective is that of the archetypal gammon that Zog describes.
Which kind of proves the point he was making that resorting to knee-jerk stereotypes as wighter does with regard to those who rely on benefits is as stupid as it is cruel.
And that just about sums you up, I’m no benefit scrounger, you are one sad sad individual.
Grow up!
And sometimes the gestapo get it very wrong by jumping in and split up families before giving help to keep the families together,I know they’ve got it wrong before and children have died, but the Isle of Wight social services need investigating especially when the parents are innocent of slanderous false allegations that are made against them by a third party gossip and the child is not in danger, small island mentality sorry if you’re a good social worker ? but equally sorry if you’re not
The opposite is also true. Your a concerned neighbour who regularly has to listen to domestic violence. You report it but the party being assaulted refuses to press charges despite their child being in the middle of it. Social services do little to stem the violence and leave it to the police. Who do nothing. Its how little Arthur got murdered and its still going on here on the island.
Politics. Bringing poverty to the people in the race to the bottom.