Submission to Cabinet

Members will be aware of the joint Estyn/CSSIW report published in August 2011 which highlighted failings in the council’s procedures with regard to child safeguarding.
One consistent thread throughout the report was poor and non-existent record keeping.
The following comments extracted from the report give a flavour of the general tenor of the criticisms levelled at the council.
51 This lack of transparency raises questions as to whether the protection of the child is always given priority over the reputation of the authority.
59 The lack of agenda items and minutes of meeting [of the cabinet member] with the Director of Educations means the cabinet member is unable to challenge the education department senior managers appropriately because there is no audit trail that can be used to hold them to account.
95 The investigation concludes that there has been a lack of oversight by elected members of officers at the highest level within the authority, of the management and investigation of cases of alleged professional abuse in education services.
96 The absence of effective governance in relation to safeguarding and protecting children reflects the specific failures within the culture of the authority as a whole.

At about the same time, Estyn published a report on the education services.
Understandably, this was somewhat overshadowed by the report on child safeguarding, but in many ways it was just as damning.
Out of the nine headings, only two were considered good with five being judged adequate and two unsatisfactory. The overall judgement was unsatisfactory, as was the council’s capacity to improve.
The reaction of Cllr Huw George was to try to downplay the seriousness of the joint report’s findings.
He told the Western Telegraph: “On average we have 18,000 children and young people in the education system, every year – over four years 72,000 children – just in schools, and from that 72,000 we've had 25 reports, some have been found to have no merit.
“But this report concentrates on three and the report comes out with a line and of those three there was the ‘potential for harm’, not that any harm happened to children but there was a potential. Of 72,000 people, at the end of the day there is a risk. Pembrokeshire will stand by this report if it says we want to minimise the risk.
“Once a report has been made this authority has moved quickly, once an allegation has been made, no children have been harmed because this authority has taken decisive action.”
(Western Telegraph, August 24, 2011)
Sue Perkins, then leader of the Labour Group, told the newspaper: “I expect the council executive to take it seriously. Some of the defensive media comments by Cllr Huw George are frankly disappointing and they betray a culture of complacency within the ruling Independent Group.”
This attempt by Cllr George to gloss over the problems only made things worse because it implanted in the minds of Welsh Government Ministers the idea that the authority’s promises of reform were not made with any real enthusiasm and commitment.
As a result, the Welsh Government appointed a Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) to support the authority in the production of an action plan for the improvement of safeguarding and that was superseded in October 2011 by the Pembrokeshire Ministerial Board (PMB) with a wider remit than MAG.
In its report of 27 May 2012 the PMB advised Welsh ministers that in its view the authority does not see the need for change in the culture and modes of operation which it has always followed. On the contrary, it wishes to see them preserved.
The PMB concluded that: “The logical consequence of this situation is that the Board is placed in the position of being unable to perform, in relation to officers, the role for which it was appointed. It is not possible to be a productive “critical friend” to a person who essentially does not wish to be befriended. Indeed, there is the further consideration that persistence by the “friend” in such a relationship in effect colludes with the maintenance of the status quo.”
In a letter to the council Education Minister Leighton Andrews said that PMB has informed him that …”there is ongoing failure (by the authority) to understand real concerns and criticisms; or alternatively, a deliberate decision to ignore them” and “overall, there is an ongoing failure to address the fundamental issues”.
The PMB also takes issue with the way that its communications with the council have been interpreted with “praise of positive comment exaggerated and criticism played down or ignored.”
The result was that the Minister amended the PMB’s terms of reference to include the powers to give instructions to the council.
So, almost 12 months after the publication of the CSSIW/Estyn report, there had been so little progress that Welsh ministers felt compelled to take this drastic step.
Earlier this year, the Director of Social Services, Mr John Skone, announced his decision to retire and just recently the Director of Education announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year.
So far the political leadership of the authority has remained unscathed.

The purpose of this motion of no confidence is to discover the extent to which other members of the council agree with the proposition that, in a democracy, it is the politicians and not the officers who should take responsibility when go things go wrong.

Over a year has passed since the initial reports were published and there is little or no evidence that the pace of change in the intervening period has been anything like quick enough to address the serious deficiencies identified.

I am also given to understand that there is another Estyn report in the pipeline and that early indications are that it is likely to conclude that the required improvements in the authority’s education service are unlikely to be achieved in the near future.

Cllr George was the serving Cabinet member for both areas covered by the original reports, and is presently cabinet member with responsibility for education, and this notice of motion seeks to hold him to account for his failure to take control of the situation and ensure that the necessary improvements were implemented in a timely fashion.