What if the key to leading outstanding public services wasn't control and rigour, but curiosity and kindness?

In this episode, Ian Dodds shares hard-won lessons on running children's services with compassion, protecting prevention when budgets are under pressure, and building the kind of trust and psychological safety that lets teams do their best work.

As joint Director of Children's Services for Richmond and Kingston - through Achieving for Children, one of the first shared children's services models in the country - Ian has spent his career proving that kindness and honesty aren't soft options but the foundation of consistently outstanding services.

We talk about the origin story of Achieving for Children, how both boroughs reached an outstanding Ofsted judgement, why co-production is worth the time it takes, shifting money into early help to keep families out of crisis, the real role of AI in freeing practitioners to be more relational, and what it takes to stay calm when everything is "everything everywhere all at once."

If you work in or care about children's services, local government, or leading with compassion under pressure, this one is full of practical, generous, no-nonsense wisdom.

You'll learn about:

• Why there's nothing kind about letting someone fail - and what real kindness looks like at work
• How to proportion your time and energy across competing priorities without spreading yourself too thin
• Building a mature approach to data and insight so it becomes an early warning system, not a stick to beat people with
• Why co-production feels slow but produces stronger, more durable solutions
• Protecting early help and prevention when it's the easiest thing to cut
• The role of AI in creating capacity for more relational work with families
• Creating psychological safety so people raise problems early, when you can still do something about them

Stay connected:

• Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
• Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
• Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
• Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk

In the beginning of workshops that I run with people, I often like to try and address the power imbalance between people that are really senior and people that are perhaps a bit lower down the organisation. And one of the questions I often ask is, when you introduce yourself to people, I want you to try and introduce yourself and your role as if you're talking with a five-year-old. So want to have a go at that? So my name is Ian Dodds. and I'm the Executive Director of Children's Services. And I suppose if I was explaining that to a five year old, I would say that my job is about making sure that children who live in Richmond and Kingston are safe and happy and healthy. They go to a good school where they can play with their friends and they can learn and they get all the help that they need to achieve all that they want to do when they grow up. Well, that's lovely. Thank you. It really is lovely. The reality is that this specific role is one of, if the most stressful in local government. And you have chosen to do it across two boroughs. So I suppose my question is, why are you doing this yourself?

Yeah, well, I like the job. That's a good start.

And I think it is one of the most difficult jobs in local government. I think that's probably true.

I mean, the difficulty of the two borough thing, and I often think to myself, wouldn't it be easier if you just did this job in a single borough? Because the challenge of the job is a duplication, essentially. It's having two sets of members to support, two corporate leadership teams. It's around, to an extent, differential priorities in each local authority. So it is time consuming in that you have to do things twice.

But actually, the core of the job it is really enjoyable in the large part. there's always going to be stressful days, isn't there? They're always going to be difficult things. And at the moment it feels that there's a lot going on. I talk about, you know, change in children's services being everything everywhere all at once at the moment. But, you know, I work with a really great team.

who are really committed to supporting children and young people. Not only the team that I lead in Achieving for Children, but the wider team that I work with. So, head teachers in schools, staff in schools, governing bodies, health colleagues who are going through their own change at the moment, the police, voluntary sector organisations. So the support for children and the commitment to children and young people in Richmond and Kingston is high and that makes the job easier to do. And I get to spend time in my diary going out and meeting different people who work with children and young people and indeed with children and young people themselves. And that is really motivating. That's the best part of my job when I get to go out to schools or meet with a youth council or work on a project with children and young people. So I try in my job to achieve a balance where I do things which motivate me, but I also do the things that I have to do as part of that job, some of which are really difficult and stressful. and I definitely observe that about you. I spoke to a few of my former colleagues, your current colleagues, to hear what their sort of view is on you, if they were to sort of summarize you and what makes you special or hard work. And one of the... So spill on that. I can spill. One of the things that Suzanne said was that what's quite obvious is that everybody is asking for your time and that could be children and young people, that could be members, that could be other members of the senior leadership team and that challenge is magnified for you because it's crossed 2 boroughs. And she was saying that somehow you managed to give a piece of yourself to people and she's very impressed with how you're somehow able to do that with grace and And with calm, I think that's the word that I think of when I think about you. Even in moments where times are very difficult, there's enormous amounts of pressure, you do somehow manage to remain, at least on the surface, very calm and make time for people in all of these competing priorities. Is that how you've always been or is that something that you've learned to do? So I think I am relatively calm as a person. Who wants a leader of an organisation running around, waving their hands and they're panicking. Nobody wants that. So, the role requires me to, in my leadership, show that I'm calm and in control even when I don't feel I am sometimes. So I do, I naturally am quite calm. I think probably I internalise quite a lot of the difficult things.

there are trusted people I have, as everyone does, who you would talk to about the things that you're worried about, and I am better if I talk things through. That helps me to think about how I might approach something.

But, you know, you need to do that with a small number of people that you trust. You don't want to go spilling out all over the shop. So, yeah, I think to answer your question, I think calmness is probably part of how I operate.

it is difficult to give your time to everybody. And I, have in the past, tried to fit everything in. And what you end up doing is just giving an insufficient amount of time to everybody. So I probably have learned over the time that I've been a joint DCS across two local authorities that you have to proportion your time out.

make sure that you spread yourself evenly across the organisation, make every informal opportunity count. So, if I'm in the kitchen making a cup of tea, have a conversation with people who are in the kitchen, show you're interested in what they're doing, ask them how it's going, you know, using those opportunities to be visible across the organisation. And sometimes you have to say that's, that's less of a priority than that. So I had a, had a chief executive who said to me, it's probably okay to miss one thing, but don't miss two on a row. And I kind of take that into how I organise my time now. So, you know, there are some things that I would just have to miss and send a deputy to and other things I'll prioritise, but I shouldn't, you know, send a deputy to the same meeting twice.

And sometimes, the things you're asked to do are nice, but not essential. And sometimes you have to let those go.

But it's also about work life balance, isn't it? And wellbeing. And I talk to staff about that a lot around, you know, finding the joy in the job. And so I am conscious about doing things that I enjoy as well, you know, and spending whole days on, you know, virtual meetings or in-person meetings is not good for my wellbeing. So I need to go out, see people, meet people, find out what's happening. So, yeah, but it's not easy. And it does mean sometimes that you have to use some of your evenings and a couple of hours of the weekend just to catch up on the routine things that can wait a bit. Although I don't, I don't suggest that anyone does that all the time. You know, you've got to get the balance right, haven't you? Well, working with you is fun. I mean, that sounds sort of almost trite to say, but you do make the workforce fun. And that was, I spoke with Joel briefly, Joel Harper. And that was one of his reflections from working with you was that you really do make the work fun and sort of find moments of joy and levity in it. And I think that's so vastly important because the work that you do in children's services is very serious. But it doesn't mean that it can't be, there can't be joy to be found in that work. That's true, yeah. So you mentioned about focusing on the things that are essential. I read a book called Essentialism. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this book, but it's got an idea in it, which is to ask yourself, what is my highest point of contribution? And to work on the essential few things and try and ignore the trivial many. So I'm interested to know for you, a week in your life, what does it look like when you're making your highest point of contribution? What are the things that you're doing that feel like this is the right way for me to be spending my time. So I suppose looking forward is the thing that is most helpful to me. Right. You know, you could call that, you know, strategy, couldn't you? But actually it's about saying, you know, where do we need to get to and what things do we need to line up in order to get there?

And that involves working out who needs to be involved, joining things up across the organisation, making sure we're all pulling in the right direction, making sure we got the skills, capability, capacity to do that work, coming up with creative ideas, not just myself, but, you know, although I like that bit of it, you know, I like contributing, but, you know, making sure that's the culture of the organisation, the way of working. So that's how I would like to spend all of my time. It doesn't quite work like that, does it? Because you always get dragged into some of the operational detail sometimes. And I think it's interesting, isn't it? I don't know if it's true of all DCSs. But the way I have experienced being a DCS is that you can move quite quickly from that big strategic thinking, you know, standing on the balcony, choreographing the dance floor.

That's something that my, you know, fellow DCS Alan Pofovici and Wandsworth talks about a lot to actually being on the dance floor and doing some of those things. So And in a way I quite like that. what part of the way that I approach being a DCS is that I like to know the detail. I like to know what is happening operationally. And that might be understanding what it's like for some of our most complex children and young people. But it will be like, what are the particular pressures for teams? What does performance look like? You know, where are we with the budget? You know, what ideas do you have for doing things better? So I like the mix of big strategic discussions and then more operational discussions. And sometimes I think, you know, is that how other DCSs do the job? But actually, does that really matter because it works for me and it works in the context that I'm working in. So I'm pretty comfortable with that approach. I think one thing that you're very good at is storytelling and communicating a direction of travel in language that makes sense to everybody and with some humour and some wit, which I think is useful too. And I suppose that, I don't know, I'm imagining that knowing a certain amount of the operational detail and being being sort of under the skin of it is helpful in order to be able to figure out, well, what's the best way of communicating the story, be it to members or to other members of the leadership team or indeed to Ofsted when they come in. Would that be fair to say, Nick? I think that would be fair. So, you know, having a grasp of operational detail is important to me in how I do the job. And it does help, you're right, with the storytelling. So, you know, and I think that helps staff to understand across the organisation that what it's like for them.

And I have to invest some time in that, so that is about the conversations that you have in the corridor, but it's also about spending time with teams and going to events and

just generally putting yourself in places where you're going to speak to staff. Floor walking is a good example of that, And yes, it helps. It certainly helps with members who, because they are out on the doorstep, aren't they? And in particular, they are at the moment. So we're heading into that election time where they're out knocking on doors saying, you know, what can the council do to you? And we're getting loads of questions back from councillors around, you know, What are you doing with this or what's happening for this family? So, you know, that helps me get an understanding and it helps me to have conversations with staff around what's going on in children's services. And it's invaluable when you get to the inspection space, you know, where you're expected to know the absolute detail or I feel that I'm expected to know the absolute detail of it. Well, I'm going to get into the inspection regime in some detail later on. But I don't want to skip over the story of Achievement for Children, because this is a trailblazing model, really, delivery model for children's services. It's old now, though. Yeah, I know, but I don't think, because even now, because it's been eight years since I worked at Achievement for Children, and even now I find myself, when I meet colleagues, certainly outside of London, they're not really familiar with the story or the model. Can you tell us about that? What's the origin story of Achievement for Children? So it started back in 2010. So what's that 15 years ago now? And we had a new conservative administration in Richmond. And at the time I was one of the assistant directors in Richmond and Nick Whitfield was the director of Children's Services.

And he got called in to meet with the leader of the council and he thought that, he was going to be called in to be told to make some significant cuts to children's services. But actually the conversation went quite differently and it was around, think creatively about how we could deliver children's services differently to improve outcomes for children, but also, operate more cost efficiently.

And it was his idea then to look at a shared children's services in a different type of delivery model. And at that point, it wasn't clear what that might look like.

And he had previously worked in our neighbouring authority, which was Kingston. And so he understood the similarities between the two local authorities. They're both relatively small. They're geographically next to each other. They've got a very similar demography, very similar profile of need. So he saw the opportunity then to have a shared service across those two local authorities. And there had been a long history of shared services in local government, but not in terms of children's services. So he started the conversations and I mean, I was involved in those conversations in the early days and they just went on and on and on without a huge amount of progress, if I'm honest with you, because you get into bits of tussles around, what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up as you enter into shared services arrangements. It seemed to go on for a couple of years until there was a bit of a crisis moment in Kingston when they were inspected by Ofsted and judged to be inadequate. And the solution to that was a partnership with a good or outstanding local authority and at the time Richmond was good and so the kind of joint service was seen as the solution and the kind of the pace of the change picked up and pretty soon We were working in Kingston as their improvement partner.

And then in 2013, we entered into an agreement that we would create Achieving for Children as a shared service model across the two local authorities. And as you know, it came into existence in 2014. And it's kind of developed over time.

the core of it is the same but we've learned a lot of lessons, we've tweaked the structure, we've tweaked our way of working and we've ended up with what is now a fairly well embedded shared service model which works for both local authorities and more importantly it works for the children, young people and families who live in those two boroughs and outcomes for them are consistently good. Yeah and it's a model I'm particularly proud of. It's one I've been involved with from the very start. And that's unusual, isn't it, when you get to see something through in that way. But it's a community interest company, which means it generates some income for benefit of the community provided it's reinvested. It is a community interest company, yeah. So it can't make a profit or a surplus unless it reinvests that into the core services that it provides. And at the beginning we did much more of that, but obviously we do less of it now. But the original aim was that it would expand from the original membership of Richmond and Kingston to a five borough model. It would have 5 local authorities in it. That was seen to be the optimal size of the company. And it expanded to include Windsor and Maidenhead in 2017. But it hasn't grown beyond then. You know, there are some We don't have a fully integrated service across Richmond, Kingston, Windsor and Maidenhead. So they operate their children's services separately to Kingston and Richmond. There are some joint frontline services, fostering the virtual school, but the back office, the corporate services, the enabling services across Richmond, Kingston and Windsor and Maidenhead are all joined up. and in the company rather than in the local authority. Yeah. Is it that there are barriers to scaling beyond that, or is it just that you've learned that this feels like an appropriate size, giving you economies of scale without stretching you too far? What's the reason for staying at three? So I think the Richmond and Kingston model works because they're next to each other, they're geographically close, and therefore you can fully integrate all of your services. We've taken out considerable savings as a result of that model. You know, I think 10 million we've saved in terms of how we deliver services because they are joint. It's also protected some of the smaller services that otherwise we probably would have lost.

We don't have integrated services with Windsor Maiden because it's at a distance from us.

So I think if the company were to grow, it would seem logical now that we've admitted Windsor and Maidenhead to look for a partner for them and do what we've done in Richmond and Kingston in Windsor and Maidenhead and another partner. We haven't managed to land that, although It probably remains an ambition, although, you know, and I can't really speak for what's happening in Windsor and Maidenhead, but I suspect that that's now going to be overtaken by local government reform and what happens to those six local authorities in Berkshire. But I don't know.

I also think politically the main owners of the company, which are Kingston and Richmond, probably feel that want to focus on their own services now. And the opportunities for income generation, which you've just talked about, are probably reduced a bit. There are other sector-led improvement models and opportunities, which mean that the market's a bit fuller now than it perhaps was when we established Achieving for Children. So in London, you've got the London Improvement and Innovation Agency. There's lots of consultancies, including yours, which do a lot of work in children's services, yeah. So there's less opportunity to do that. We still do some work through what used to be called the Partners in Practice programme with other local authorities around the country, but I think now on specific areas of improvement. Yeah. Well, so let's focus on Kingston and Richmond. So the children's services that you were responsible for are both outstanding now, which is a really remarkable achievement. Thank you. I'm interested to know what, let's think about getting getting Kingston back to the baseline that it needed to be at and then the journey beyond that to getting both services to being outstanding. What are the ingredients that need to be in place or the, I suppose, the enabling conditions that have made that transformation possible? So yeah, so Kingston, which was inadequate, was the first of those authorities to become outstanding. That's amazing. And we did that in two inspection cycles. So it went from, it did the kind of, it went from inadequate to good and then from good to outstanding. And then it's been inspected again and it's remained outstanding.

So that was, so I think the kind of ingredients that allowed us to move to a good and then an outstanding judgement in Kingston were around getting the delivery model right. So they had moved to a locality delivery model just before they became inadequate, which staff didn't really understand. So they weren't clear about what was expected of them in terms of practice and what the kind of frameworks that they should be using to deliver good social work with children and young people. And they'd also in that taken away quite a lot of their early help, early support, early intervention services. So part of our role in that was building back that early help offer and making it a multi-agency offer, not just the local authority, but the local authority working in partnership with statutory partners like health, but also the voluntary sector so that there was a strong universal and a strong targeted early help offer in the borough. And then being clear about what our social work model is, what the bottom lines were in terms of social work practice, having a really good and well developed quality assurance mechanism so that we knew what practice was looked like, where to focus our efforts on improving practice. You know, and core to all of that is having, you know, a skilled empowered and motivated workforce. And so that, you know, we put a lot of effort into that work. And, you know, the benefit, I think, of the achieving for children model is it is solely focused on children. Yeah, it's not sometimes drawn into some of those bigger, wider corporate issues for the for the main body of the staff group. I mean, it is for me, but not for everybody. And, you know, we're very clear about what what the culture of the organisation is, how you work together, how we don't work in silos, how we join things up. So that has been helpful. So I think those are the kind of factors that have helped us deliver that improvement at what is a fairly quick pace. We also benefited from external support and advice. We had an improvement advisor who was helping us do that. And there is real value in having a fresh pair of eyes look on things and, you know, that independent scrutiny of your work. Because sometimes when you're in there doing it, you're missing some, you know, you're missing some of the stuff that you if you take a step back and look more strategically, you can see need to be fixed.

And I suppose, I mean, I was the director of improvement at the time and

Having a really clear plan based on data, based on practice insight, based on quality assurance was really helpful because I liken it a bit to going in to a teenager's really, really dirty bedroom and think, how on earth do I tidy this up and how on earth do I get this right? And you have to work out what's the most important thing to do first or what's the foundation that you need to get right. So we focused on getting the basics right and then extending practice. And at a point when we thought that basic practice was where it should be, then you can do some of the more innovative, more creative things that we've done, which move you from that solid good into the outstanding judgment, I think. But inspection is a... I don't fully understand it because, the practice from my perspective across Richmond and Kingston was very similar, but it wasn't until earlier this year that we managed to move Richmond from good to outstanding, even though, you know, we'd already achieved that in Kingston. And from my perspective and from what I was seeing and feeling that that practice was the same. And some of that's about the inspection process itself. And

some of it is about the wider system in which children's services work. So an inspection, whilst it's about children's services, is heavily influenced by what's going on around you, and what's happening for children and families. So, you know, what's happening in the health system, what's happening in other aspects of the local authority, you know, housing is particularly important. So I think, you know, part of what we've been able to achieve in terms of moving from good to outstanding is around that corporate ownership from the local authority, but also from our strategic partners around focusing on children and young people. So, you know, that's I think probably also one of those ingredients that helps you deliver a good and outstanding service. So, you know, fixing children's services, to use the term you said earlier, is not just about children's services, it's about everybody else. It needs political buy-in, it needs political leadership, it needs commitment to put in the right resources to deliver those services. So part of my job is to make sure all of those things are aligned. Yeah. We talked a bit about data and learning there. And that was something, now I've worked in, goodness knows how many different local authorities, and there are so many different approaches to the use of data. Some are far more mature than others. And in some places, the tail really does wag the dog and the focus on the KPIs becomes the work rather than the focus on learning. And I think that was one of the things that I was struck by when I came to Achievement for Children was that the approach to not only just getting data together, but generating insight from the data was really quite mature from a very, very early stage. And I wonder if you could talk about that because you were director of improvement at that point. How did you go or how did you think about data? What was necessary in order for you to be able to figure out what are the right things for us to be doing? So that is interesting because what I didn't say about one of the things that had happened in Kingston as a local authority then which had contributed, I think, to it moving to an inadequate judgment is that they had pulled all of their corporate services into the corporate centre. So children's services didn't have its own performance or intelligence or insight function. It was part of the corporate function, whereas previously it had been in the service. So what they were lacking was the kind of immediacy of that performance information. They didn't know what was happening to their own services in terms of data, in terms of the timeliness of things, the compliance with things. So one of the first things that needed to happen was to build back that capacity. And we do have that capacity in-house and it's really important to us in terms of it's your early warning system, isn't it? So

We collect quite a lot of data and I can't pretend that I look at it all the time. I look at the headlines, the kind of health indicators that I know I need to be aware of. But we have an established... Performance Quality and Innovation Board, which monthly looks at all of the learning from the organisation, so it's performance data, it's also learning from complaints, it's also learning from independent scrutiny, peer reviews. And it's also learning from our quality assurance mechanism. So practice audits and anything else, any other intelligence we've got about what's going on. And it's that group that do the analysis of that data together and the insight for that data. And that's what generates the learning about what's going in the organisation and also agrees the actions that need to address it. So my two operational directors in Children's Services chair those boards and generate that intelligence with input from, you know, service leaders, the intelligence team, the performance team and, you know, other people who can contribute to it and have a perspective on it.

And it works for us. It works for us. So, just this week we've had a conversation at my senior leadership team on some intelligence that came out of that discussion in that we've got a higher proportion enrichment of cases now which are going into a child protection conference which don't end up on a child protection plan. So we've got to understand what's happening in that system, you know. And the PQI will be the group that commissions that piece of deep dive work to understand what's going on, will receive it back, make sure that they're comfortable that that's an accurate picture of what's happening in the organisation and that the system is right to address it. And then it gets reported back into my senior leadership team. And you know, then I, so I maintain my oversight of it at that time. level. Sometimes I'm a naturally curious person and I think that's probably a really good quality in a DCS that you need to be professionally curious and so sometimes I interfere and I meddle. You do your best. Well I like to know so you know sometimes I will perhaps overstep the mark a bit around that but it's useful for me because it's about understanding what's happening on the ground. Yeah and I also think it's the what's the motivation that sits behind you, stepping in? And I think in your case, it's not you micromanaging that process. It's not you trying to figure out what's going wrong for the purposes of performance managing people. It's real curiosity and trying to understand what's happening in the system, isn't it? Yeah, and you know, what's within my power or gift in order to improve it. So is it about the allocation of resources? Is it about how the services are structured? Is it about a breakdown in communication between services or with partners? Is something else happening in the system which is influencing that? So there will be things that I can legitimately help to fix.

And what I don't want to happen is for us to move into into a kind of crisis response. I want to be able to plan and manage that in a calm way rather than having to respond to it at a point when it gets to a place where it's much more difficult to fix. Such a fine balance, isn't it? Because for people to be honest in organizations, particularly where there is potentially high levels of risk, it does need to be quite a lot of psychological safety, doesn't there? To be able to say, oh, actually, this is moving in a direction that we're not happy with and we need to have a conversation about this so that we can learn and figure out what to do. Because in lots of organizations, because the culture perhaps isn't quite right, maybe there isn't enough psychological safety. that becomes buried and that's a real problem, isn't it? Yeah. Do you think about that, about how we create sort of safety for people to be able to? Yeah, of course. I don't want an organisation where there's blame, you know. So if something is going wrong or you're worried about something, tell someone and tell them at a point when they can do something to support you to deal with it. the last thing I want is to be in a situation where I'm hearing from an Ofsted inspector that frontline staff tell me that they're under-resourced or that the system doesn't work for them or that we've put in loads of bureaucratic processes which aren't working for them. You know, tell us that early on and I suppose part of the way of addressing that is about co-producing solutions with people. So we're going through the moment, aren't we, with quite a lot of reform in children's social care and we're about to go through a process where I suspect there will be quite a lot of reform in the world of special educational needs and disability as well.

And we've also got new relationships with the integrated care boards and health services to to establish and we've also got to deliver targets around best start in life. All of that is happening at the moment and it's best for us to co-produce what we're doing with our staff because that gives them the opportunity to shape the policies and the processes and the way that we work from the earliest opportunity. That can be tough because very rarely do we get loads of people in the room who all think the same thing. But we have to manage that as a process. And actually, the output and the outcome is much stronger if you follow that process. It's more time consuming, it's longer, but you need to do that. So in doing that, you're also reinforcing the culture of the organisation, the way that we work here. it isn't about blame. It is about jointly doing things together. It's about breaking down silos. It's about designing services around what works for children and families. All of that kind of narrative, the storytelling you were talking about earlier, comes about through that co-production process. Yeah, I find the narrative about co-production being really time consuming to be really amusing. I wanted to say the word amusing. I like the way it sounds coming out of my mouth because it is time consuming, but what it does is just shine a light on how much time it takes to do good, meaningful work, to come to appropriate conclusions about how best to meet the needs of people with potentially very complex problems.

So yeah, I mean, if you don't go down that route, then ultimately it stores up problems for later, which is infinitely more resource intensive and time consuming. But we talked a bit about the Ofsted regime and I'm interested to, because we've sort of talked about this just socially about the experience of going through an offset inspection and I'd be interested to know just how that feels as a DCS. So you get the I don't know, maybe you're a few months before you think you're going to get a call. What starts to brew up for you when you're waiting?

Well, I get them quite frequently. Exactly, because you've done this yourself. I get a couple of sets of osten infections.

I suppose, you know, they're a fixture of my life. That's not going to change. As far as I can tell, that's not going to change.

But I don't think my approach to that is to make sure that we've got a constant focus on the quality of practice because that's what's important. You know, it's the quality of the practice and the quality of the services we offer to children and young people all the time. So it's continual, you know, that preparation for inspection because we're continually looking at how quality, how good our services are and where they might need some additional support or improvement.

But when they come, I mean, I've got a rough idea about where they come. I think one of the things that would help me would be if I knew where they would come. One of the things that I really struggle with is around going on holiday, for example. And I know that's true for my colleagues as well. So having an indication of when they're coming would be helpful. But they are stressful for the staff group. And I suppose my job as a DCS is to try and make it less stressful, to stress to staff that this is an opportunity for you to showcase the really great work that you do and the really positive outcomes you achieve for children. It's also about making sure that we've got all of the processes and systems in right and that we're regularly testing them so that it feels as calm and as ordered as it possibly can during that period. When you say processes and systems, do you mean? Well, I mean all the data, all the information that Ofsted are going to ask for, our self-assessment, that we've got a plan, that we know who's doing what, when, who's leading on what aspects of the inspection, how we're going to gather feedback from staff who've been spoken to by inspectors, you know, even down to, you know, which room are they going to sit in? Is it far enough away from frontline practice on the floor?

Have we got meeting rooms? You know, have I briefed Or have I or other colleagues briefed the chief executive, the lead member, anybody, any partners who are going to be spoken to? So it's a bit of a military operation and, you know, we do regular tests of it to make sure that we're ready for when an inspection call comes. At the moment, we've just had both of them in the last 12 months, so we've got a bit of a a breathing space. You can go on holiday. I could go on holiday. What are you doing here talking to me? I could go on holiday now. In fact, I was on holiday last week. Sounds lovely. But yeah, and I mean, the issue for me with inspections is, and the thing that worries me is that, you know, I'm ultimately accountable for what happens and that's a difficult place to be sometimes.

But I'm also acutely aware of the pressure it puts on other people if we aren't able to demonstrate, you know, the really good work that we do. But actually, because we do it all the time, I'm confident in it. And, you know, I'm willing to, you know, make those points forcefully if I need to, offset inspectors, because I'm confident about the quality of the practice that we have in both boroughs.

But for me, it's all about prepare, prepare, prepare. Other than the timeliness of them or the advance warning, is there anything that you would change about the Ofsted inspection? I use the phrase to be able to make your highest point of contribution. Is there anything that could be changed about the inspection regime that would help people delivering services to make their highest point of contribution?

So I think probably that the current inspection regime is probably one of the best that we've had. The framework is probably one of the better ones we've had or the best one we've had. I mean, in that it is focused on outcomes for children and young people. And it's, you know, it looks very carefully at social work practice, at casework and at outcomes for children and young people. That's positive around it. You know, we've had an announcement earlier this week, haven't we, at the conference from Martin Oliver that, you know, from next year that there won't be the headline judgement anymore. So it's following the pattern that's been introduced in schools. I think that's probably positive. I mean, it's very difficult to encapsulate. the complexity of a service in a one or two word judgement, isn't it? Yeah. Because, you know, I'm lucky to have an outstanding judgement, but I know that all my services are outstanding and the value in inspection for me is in the quality of the narrative you get about how you can further improve outcomes for children and young people. So, you know, enrichment, although That's the most recent inspection I've had, although we are outstanding.

We have got work to do because the narrative of the report tells us that, you know, for some children, we're not assessing the cumulative impact of neglect well enough and that some of them are sitting too long in neglectful households without our intervention.

That's helpful to us. because we can do something about that and we can engage partners around doing something about that. So I think inspections are helpful. The removal of the one where judgement is good.

Building a positive relationship with the inspection team is key for me. So the best part of it, the best inspectors do good as they go. So they'll tell you where you can improve things and how you can improve things. They don't just save it up for the feedback meeting at the end and then the recommendations. the best inspectors are the ones that support you throughout the process and give you tips and hints and point you in the right direction. And I've been lucky, the last two inspection teams I've had have really, really done that.

If you're still here, my assumption is you're finding this conversation useful. recording these interviews because we think it's important to share stories of people who are leading and designing more human impactful and relational public services and we'd like as many people as possible to see them if you think you can help us with that then I'd be so grateful if you did one of three things you can just like the video and that'll help other people to find it in future you can leave us a comment and let us know why you stuck around or you could subscribe to the channel and honestly I've got no good reason for that other than It would cheer me up. Okay, back to the two.

I want to change gears a little bit and talk about prevention because the financial situation of government is increasingly perilous and it seems to get harder and harder to manage the budget with every passing cycle. And in children's services, maintaining A relentless focus on prevention is is essential not only because it's the right thing to do for children and families, but it also makes sense financially in the long run. And I'm interested to think about how you think about balancing the need to maintain a relentless focus on prevention, but at the same time be laser focused on the statutory part of the service. How does that work? Because that's an enormous tension, isn't it? Is it? I assume because of the scarcity of financial resources.

Well, I suppose, yes, in the sense that, if you've got to make financial reductions, then often it's your non-statutory services that you look to early in order to make those savings because they're essentially an easy win.

I haven't taken that approach and actually we've protected our early help or our early intervention services as much as we possibly can because our approach has been to try and meet children and families needs as early as possible with the lowest level of intervention and you can't do that unless you've got really solid universal services and really good targeted early help services. So we've protected those as much as we possibly can. Because I know that if we didn't have those, far more families would end up in our statutory services as children in need or on child protection plans or indeed coming into care. So we are focusing as much as we can on building stronger early help services. So, you know, our development of family hubs, for example, is contributing to that, how we're reshaping youth services so that they have a greater focus on targeted youth work, detached youth work, work with children who are vulnerable to exploitation and risks outside the home. So we're, I suppose we're shifting some of our early help services away from a completely universal offer to one which is more targeted, but we're retaining the strength of that. Yeah.

And it is beginning to work. I mean, we've had to take a risk because I've had to move financial resource out of the statutory end of the system to invest it in early help.

We've tried to do that in a very planned way. and in a very evidence-based way so that we are only investing in those services where we can see that they are making a difference to diverting children away from statutory services by meeting their needs earlier. One of my worries about early help And some approaches to early help is, we go out and look for families who might need our support and we then bring them into services and they naturally, once they're in the system, they're on the train, aren't they? And they naturally progress up into child in need or child protection. Whereas if we hadn't done that, then they might not have come into needing those services. So

We're taking a very evidence-based approach to the early help strategies that work for us. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in your sort of matter of fact response to what I was saying. You know, is it a tension? I think lots of people would feel that tension, but just the way that you explain, I suppose, the narrative that you're sharing is, yeah, it's kind of core to the way Achievement for Children operates in that, well, of course we should be investing in these universal services and targeted services because that is what is creating the conditions that make it possible to have outstanding services. But I think once they... Well, I don't even, I mean, I wouldn't even say that in terms of that that's what makes it possible to have outstanding services. I would say that's just the right thing to do for children and families.

You know, why would we

wait until a family is in crisis, until we give them the services that they need. We should be giving them to them as early as possible and when they need them. And, part of the thing that we're trying to do, which is, where we're headed with the children's social care reforms, is that we need to move from a position where we're rescuing families to one where we're creating resilience in families. And so, you know, part of our storytelling in the organisation is, you know, we want to meet families needs early at the lowest level of intervention and build family resilience so that we don't have to rescue families when they get to a crisis point. Yeah. And you know, that that's what we're trying to do. And, you know, the investment in early help services is part of that, you know, retaining a workforce that is

big enough, skilled enough in order to do that is part of our strategy. Now it becomes more difficult when that strategy, you can't evidence that strategy is working. And at the moment we are able to evidence that because we've got fewer children now on child protection plans, we've got fewer children in care. And I believe that we can evidence that is because of the investment that we've made in early intervention and support for families and we'll continue to do that. We'll amplify our impact of that through the children's social care reforms. What role do you see for AI in children's services in the next couple of years? Yeah, so that is something that we've invested quite a lot in and I know you've had a conversation with Jabed who leads our work around digital innovation.

So we have implemented some successful AI solutions

We've implemented magic notes, for example, which is that support for frontline practitioners in terms of case recording and other things as well.

And our estimate is that that's probably saving every practitioner around 3 hours a week. What we haven't done deliberately is to reduce our workforce. by saying, you know, by collecting up all of those 3 hours a week and then saying, okay, we'll have eight less social workers.

What I think is doing for us is creating capacity in those professionals to be able to do more direct work with children and families and, you know, longer term work with those families, which is part of that meeting their needs earlier. So that's the role for me at the moment of AI is about creating capacity in the workforce to do more intensive work with families to meet their needs so that they don't escalate into more intrusive, higher cost services later on. In time, I think once that's embedded, we might be able to look at whether we can reduce the size of the workforce, but that's not where we are at the moment. You know, if we're going to make the biggest impact on our budget in terms of financial efficiency, we have to tackle those areas where we spend a lot of money and that's around support and particularly placements for children in care. Exactly. The cost is not really in the workforce. Of course, the children's social care workforce is expensive in context of the council's budget, but it pales into comparison when compared with the cost of need if it escalates, doesn't it? Yes. Yeah. I mean, and.

the placement market at the moment is very complex, it's very difficult, and to an extent out of control. And one of our tools in order to address that is to not have children who need those placements. I mean, there's work to do around the sufficiency of placements and the cost of placements, but another strand of that is to make sure that we're not We don't need those placements for children because we're keeping families together and we're putting that intensive support around families to prevent family breakdown. You know, compared to other places I've worked in Richmond and Kingston, our profile of children in care is, you know, is older. So the majority of children who come into our care in both boroughs are 15, 16. And a lot of that is around family breakdown.

And we've invested in adolescent outreach teams and intensive support for those families to try and hold them together and to use all the resources that we've got, including our residential care homes to provide support to those families to stop that breakdown happening in the 1st place, to delay or even divert children away from care. The thing that excites me about the potential of AI is, yes, I think it's very exciting that we can free up time, but the exciting thing is that it might make it possible for them to just be more relational with people, because we're not staring at our notes or writing things on tablets. Or we've just got a bit more time to try and build a relationship and establish trust that then makes it possible to be more helpful. And I think that is I think that's a really exciting potential for it. No, I think you've hit the nail on the head there, that it is about, you know, we are an organisation where relationships are important and building relationships with children and families is important. And if you've got more time and you're not staring at the screen, of course you can have the opportunity to do that. I mean, I love, I mean, we've done some other things around AI, which are just about efficiency. You know, we've got a robot who sits in our front door. I have the impression that it's something like Metal Mickey sitting in our mash, but it's not. But it processes a lot of contacts and that's been successful. We've moved a lot of our forms from paper or e-mail forms into web forms. That's also been helpful. But I think the most impactful has been what we've just talked about, is around freeing up the time of professionals so that they can operate at the top of their profession, spend more time with children and families, and build a sustained change in those families as well, so that they don't need us, so that we can step away and let them get on with their lives.

I think that's a lovely place. I was just going to say, and also I don't have to write executive summaries of reports anymore because I get AI to do it for me. Because your buddy Gemini is doing it. I love it. Amen to that. So look, we're coming to the end of this. I wanted to, I often reflect on my career in local government, which is a little bit shorter than yours. But I've been working in or with local government for 16 years. And I remember thinking when, I remember the conversations I was having with my friends when I joined a graduate scheme in 2009, 2010. and they were going off to the city to work in law firms and banks and they just didn't get it. And I was so utterly excited to be working in communities on problems that actually mattered. But most people that work outside of local government just have no idea the variety of stuff that people get up to and the breadth of services that local government provides. and the enormous good that local government does. I'm just interested in what are some of the sort of stranger things that you find yourself involved in. Now? Well, either now or before. What are some of the things that stand out?

Well, I used to manage a family centre and I used to get up to all kinds of stuff in there. I used to be a plumber, electrician, security guard.

But now,

I mean, I have to do some things corporately. I mean, the worst thing I've ever done is organise a royal visit for the Queen's Jubilee. I mean, then never again will I do that. I mean, you know, I am naturally quite calm, but that pushed me to the nth degree. You know, I found myself at one point standing on the top of a tower block with loads of policemen. looking at potential sight lines for gunmen. That's so brilliant. I know, strange.

But now I'm, probably less than that. I mean, local government, as you say, is a very rich thing. I mean, but I get involved in all kinds of things in terms of

kind of business continuity and emergency planning, you know, so. And the exercises. Yeah. I love that stuff. Do you? I'm less good on it because I just know it's not real.

But, you know, I've learned a lot about flooding.

I've learned a lot around river management. But all of those, yeah, it is interesting. I am pretty good though at filtering out things that I

don't really need to know. I talk a lot about the corporate swerve, where I will swerve things that I think I'm not going to add any value here. In service of children and families. Yeah, exactly. Let me focus on things that I am good at. I will help with whatever you want me to do. Elections are a good example of that. I'm happy to help with those things. But, you know, really let's focus on my core skill set, which probably isn't about. flooding defences, if I'm honest with you. Didn't you meet Dolly Parton at one point? I did when she, I did meet Dolly Parton when she implemented a kind of literacy scheme for children and young people in schools. So I did meet Dolly Parton, yeah. That was well done. I remember. I did listen. I did do that. Fascinating woman, very short. Oh yeah.

I mean, the two of us together in a picture.

Neither of you were in it.

Exactly.

I'll share the picture because it has comedy value. Okay, I'm going to ask you a couple of quickfire questions and then we're going to get out of here. So #1, a book that is most influenced your thinking. So I'm probably going to pick a children's book. Is that what you're looking for? Well, there's no wrong answers. So I really like and still like Arnold Loebel. Fred and Frog and Toad are friends. Why? Because I mean, I've learned a lot about it. It's about kindness, compassion, empathy, you know, and I'm often described, I'm asked sometimes to describe what my leadership style is and I will talk about compassionate leadership and leading with kindness. And I think probably if I had to describe my leadership style, those are the words that I would use.

There's a more recent book, which is very good by Graham Alcott called Kind, which is about the power of kindness in the workplace. And I don't mean in that some kind of fluffy kindness. There's nothing kind about letting someone fail or not telling them the truth. It's about, you know, being honest with people, empowering them, trusting them, being interested in them, walking a mile in their shoes. That's what I'm interested in. It's all about, you know, we've talked about relationships, and it's about relational leadership, about compassion and kindness. And I think it probably stems from Frog and Toad of Friends. That's lovely.

What would you be doing if you weren't in local government?

God knows. I don't really understand how I've ended up where I am, if I'm honest with you. So, well, when I was a small child, I wanted to be a vet until my guinea pig died. And then that changed that.

When I left school, and went to university, I thought I wanted to become a lawyer. And certainly that persisted while I was at university. Were you studying law? No. That was problematic, I would say. Well, I don't think so, because you can convert, can't you? And I suppose what interested me in law was that kind of sense of justice, fairness.

So maybe I'd be a lawyer.

But equally, maybe I'd be working in some kind of voluntary sector organisation, which was around justice, fairness, supporting people. I'd be doing something that was about helping people.

Last one. Do you have a quote that you try and live your life by? There's one on my office wall, which is by Maya Angelou. So

do what you can until better and when better do better. And that kind of came through in terms of our thinking about equalities and diversity. So in thinking about how we could be a more anti-racist, more equal, fairer workforce that Value diversity, promoted inclusion. I can't pretend to know everything.

I'm white, I'm middle class, so it is about talking to people, understanding their perspective, finding out what it's like for them in the organisation. and then doing something about it.

Listen, learn, lead. I think that's a lovely place to end. Honestly, I'm so grateful for you giving me your time today. You've been very generous with me here, but also just in my career generally. I consider you a really, really good friend and this has been a really nice experience. I hope you've enjoyed it too. I have. Thank you very much. Good.