Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council

The background: In Doncaster, as in a lot of authorities, the move to Children’s Services happened at the same time as a radical re-organisation of the council as a whole, aimed at delivering the full range of services through five new neighbourhood areas. It was a bold move, anticipating a lot of the current trends towards giving people more control over the services provided by their local council.

Because education didn’t fit the new model quite as comfortably as other services, and because the council was determined to raise standards, a separate department (School Standards) was created to maintain the focus on school improvement.

There’s no doubt that it has delivered in terms of raising performance. In 2007, for example, GCSE 5 A* - C results improved by almost 6%. But there were a few straws in the wind. Schools were struggling with the fact that the services they were used to receiving were now split between two different departments, and they were making their views known in the annual survey conducted by the Audit Commission.

Concerns had also been raised in the APA and the JAR about whether the authority was best placed to address the wider agenda for schools.

There was a feeling that something needed to be done and the departure to a new job of the Director of Neighbourhoods, Communities and Children's Services provided the opportunity.

The challenge: When Navigate was engaged, all the constituent elements that go to make up a conventional children’s services department had been brought together in a new interim structure. But because of the need to maintain some continuity with the ways things had been for the previous 3 years, it was top heavy with senior management posts, and a lot of the services that would normally work closely with each other were still in different parts of the organisation.

The challenge for Navigate was to recommend a structure that would slim down the number of senior managers, encourage services to work more closely together and help build the relationship with schools….without sacrificing any of the focus on standards.

The solution: Navigate did three things. It talked to most of the senior and middle managers in the new department, it sampled opinion in schools, and it analysed the structures being developed in other parts of the country.

Because the whole process of merging the two departments had created some inevitable uncertainty, there was a need to move quickly. There is nothing more damaging to staff morale than indecision and delay. So the whole exercise was conducted in less than six weeks, with Christmas in between.

The result: The outcome was a new management structure for the new department, which was the subject of much discussion and consultation during the Spring and Summer and is now being implemented. It didn’t win everybody’s whole-hearted approval. There are still some lingering concerns expressed about linking standards and inclusion together under a single Assistant Director, for example. But it created a much better platform for Doncaster to maintain rising standards and to involve headteachers more closely in the work of the authority.