Nottingham City Council gets nearly £350k to improve 'inadequate' services

Nottingham City Council's Loxley House in Nottingham city centre
-Credit: (Image: Joseph Raynor/ Nottingham Post)


Nottingham City Council has been given nearly £350,000 to continue improving its 'inadequate' children's services. The Labour-led authority received Ofsted's lowest rating after a 2022 inspection found too many children were being left with insufficient protection.

The council narrowly avoided having its children's services being run by commissioners, with the Department for Education (DfE) instead monitoring progress. The DfE has now awarded Nottingham City Council £342,752 to continue making improvements.

The money comes on top of just over £500,000 of government money already given to the council for children's services improvements in 2023. Accepting the funding, a Nottingham City Council report says: "Without the funding, children's services will struggle to deliver key practice improvements at pace and risk being able to make the significant improvement required to satisfy Ofsted and provide them with assurance at future inspection visits."

Areas that the new money will be spent on include workforce training and the employment of an 'improvement specialist'. The most expensive area is the development of a new case management system, which around £130,000 of the new funding will be spent on.

A full Ofsted re-inspection will eventually take place, with six monitoring visits to have taken place by that point. The most recent monitoring visit resulted in a May update from Ofsted which said although there were improvements in some areas, children in care services were still lagging behind.