Praise for Northumberland County Council's children's services team after outstanding Ofsted

Northumberland County Council's children's services department has been showered with praise after an impressive Ofsted report.

Thursday marked the first meeting of the council's family and children's services scrutiny meeting since the report by the education watchdog was published in July. The upgrade from "good" in 2020 to "outstanding" placed the council among the top 15% of all local authorities in the country.

The department was rated as outstanding in three categories, including overall effectiveness, and good in two more including the experiences and progress of children in care. Speaking at Thursday's meeting, officers and councillors spoke of their delight at the improvement journey.

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Director of education Audrey Kingham said: "Our staff got the result they deserve. We don't do what we do for Ofsted, we do it because it is the right thing to do for the young people.

"I'm particularly proud of what the young people said when they were asked what we could do - they said 'keep doing what you're doing, you're mint'. This is a brilliant outcome, but we're not complacent - our challenges continue every day in Children's Services."

The Department was rated as requires improvement as recently as 2016, but has steadily improved since then.

Service director Graham Reiter added: "We want to do the best we can for the children and young people. If any inspection finds something we can do better, we want to do it better for the young people and their families.

"When we got the judgement, it was an emotional moment. The vast majority of Ofsted's report is about the quality of our frontline procedures."

Elected councillors were also quick to praise the result. However, Coun Suzanne Fairless-Aitken feared that there was still a gap between the opportunities offered ot children in the North East when compared to those living further south.

She said: "Well done - this is excellent. My worry is that it's great to be top of the tree regionally, but I'm worried about the widening gap between London and the South East and the North East.

"This report should be used to challenge our new MPs and our new Government, to bring in proper levelling up money."

Mrs Kingham replied: "We have already approached all of our MPs, I can assure you we have started that dialogue. We feel it's really important they understand the context of where we have been, where we are now and where we are going."