A county council has affirmed its commitment to children’s services, following claims staff are ‘devastated’ over ongoing local changes.
Following a string of ‘inadequate’ Ofsted inspections, reforms to Northamptonshire’s children’s services saw seven contracts to manage centres awarded to two leading children’s charities earlier this year.
After meeting with Spurgeons – which was awarded two contracts, thought to encompass 15 centres – trade union GMB has warned a number of staff are now at risk of redundancy, with cuts to hours of work and the use of volunteers in place of paid staff.
Rachelle Wilkins, GMB regional officer, said: ‘There is now uncertainty as to the future provision of services, current opening hours of the centres and even the same familiar faces of staff on a daily basis.
‘Staff are devastated after putting so much hard work and dedication into building rapport with the parents and children.’
A spokesman from Spurgeons told LocalGov the charity would ‘do all we can to keep any job losses to a minimum’.
‘We have a long history of successfully running children's centres across the country and are delighted to have been awarded the contract to deliver these vital services in Northamptonshire. We are working with the council, the unions and service users to ensure services continue to meet demand,’ the spokesman added.
A new model adopted by Northamptonshire County Council has recently placed greater emphasis on early family support and prevention services. The county’s libraries are offering universal aspects of support, such as information, advice and children’s activities.
Responding to the GMB’s comments, a county council spokesman told LocalGov: ‘We’ve changed the way children centre services are delivered as part of our response to Ofsted’s inadequate ratings of our children’s services. In a nutshell, we haven’t been good enough at helping families in need of support with the result that many of those families’ situations have deteriorated to crisis point requiring social worker involvement.
‘To make sure we’re getting the right help to families at the right time, we’ve refocused our children’s centre services so that there’s a greater emphasis on targeted support to families. We’re also delivering some non-specialist elements of our services from our libraries so that our children’s centres providers can concentrate on delivering those early help services.
‘We’ve maintained our £10m funding for children’s centres services.’
