Structural change alone is not enough to turn around children’s services, a new report has found.
The Local Government Association-commissioned research into structural change in children’s services found structural overhauls had to be accompanied by a ‘relentless focus on the quality of practice’.
Senior leaders interviewed by Isos Partnership said that ‘structural change had been a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of improvement’.
Overhauls have been spurred by local government reorganisation and pressures on the system, and the report suggested this was ‘more likely in the future’.
The report added that structural change was largely a ‘response to adversity’ and there were ‘only a few examples of local areas embracing significant structural changes from an initial position of relative strength’.
