The new ADCS Presidential Team

ADCS President, Alison Michalska, made her inaugural speech on 6 April 2017 at the BMA in London and it definitely packs a punch – a brilliant opening address.

Please read in full and share: Alison Michalska’s Inaugural Presidential Speech 2017

Alison’s first blog as President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services is equally good: A country that works for children

Alison has taken the opportunity to thank Dave Hill, ADCS President 2015-16, for his welcome focus on changing the narrative around the care system and the development of a new sector-led approaches to improvement and we would like to give thanks too.

Now to turn back to Alison’s speech and for a flavour of what we can expect over the course of her presidential year:

The Prime Minister wants the UK to be “…a country that works for everyone…”

[…] because it will take us a little time to become a child-friendly country, what must we in local government do?

Somehow, supported by brave elected members up and down the country, we have to reapportion our money. We have to tip the balance and invest more in preventative work to reduce demands on statutory services in the knowledge that helping early will eventually pay dividends in terms of improved outcomes for children and families. Sometimes of course, prevention won’t work and children will come into care and rightly so. Now, the volume of public law care applications continues to rise. That’s bad for the system but is that necessarily a bad thing for those children? We need a more nuanced debate that isn’t just about measuring the outputs of the family courts by volume of care applications, but one that factors in some judgements (sorry about the pun) as to whether we are meeting children’s needs better.