Wednesday 2 August 2017

Smoke and mirrors

Ofsted has found that Reading Council’s children’s services continue to be ‘inadequate’.


Instead of trying to find out why Reading’s services are ‘inadequate’ – in other words doing some tough analysis to discover what needs to be put right - there now seems to be a preoccupation with outsourcing and revising governance structures.


I say this to Reading Council and their collaborators. You don’t make excellent services in committee rooms and board rooms and you don’t deliver high quality and safety by concentrating on who owns or controls what. You can only deliver excellent complex services by helping the people who deliver them to understand what they need to do to satisfy the needs of service users.

That involves moving the focus from the top of the organisation to the bottom, from the board room to the frontline. Forget the smoke and mirrors; concentrate on the knitting.