Commissioner’s report finds ‘a year’s progress has been lost’ for failing service

Children’s services in Tameside has been in disarray for years, but a progress report offers some hope in a largely scathing assessment of the directorate.

Workforce challenges; unstable leadership; and poor quality of practice have  been identified as key problems.

Ofsted identified ‘serious failures’ during its inspection in December 2023. Children were said to have been harmed, or at risk of harm.  

In the 18 months following the ‘inadequate’ inspection judgement, Tameside council has been marred by a string of issues. 

Last September, children’s commissioner Andy Couldrick’s report to the government was scathing. His report put enormous pressure on chief executive Sandra Stewart to resign.

She stepped down on October 8. She was quickly followed out of the door by council leader Ged Cooney, alongside deputies Bill Fairfoull and Jacqueline North.

An Ofsted monitoring visit in February identified no signs of improvement. Days after that report was published in March, the department was hit with an improvement notice by the Department for Education (DfE) after ‘poor progress’ in improving services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) was identified.

Mr Couldrick has now found the turmoil at the town hall has actually cost the failing service a year of improvement time. 

Quality of practice; service leadership; workforce; and strategy all put under the microscope were scrutinised. 

‘Pockets of better practice’ were identified, but that was said to reflect the work and the skills of individual social workers, rather than a improved organisational approach.

Mr Couldrick said there was only one permanent head of service in post, which isn’t enough. 

The ‘open and available style’ of DCS Jill Colbert has been credited as important in order to counteract the ‘legacy of a bullying culture’, which has ‘bred a level of fear and anxiety in the workforce’.

The absence of a stable workforce remains ‘one of the greatest threats to improvement’ in Tameside, the commissioner found. The report outlined how in January 2025, 48 per cent of social workers in the borough were agency workers.

The report’s conclusion reads: “The legacy of poor leadership at every level, front-line and strategic, and the profound weaknesses in the council’s support services and the work of multiagency partners across the system, means that a year has, in effect, been lost without any significant improvement taking place.

“The legacy of the toxic, bullying culture, in the council and in children’s services, is diminishing but has not yet disappeared, and there is still fear and anxiety in the workforce

“The impact of more recent changes, including the arrival of a new chief executive and a new, permanent DCS, is beginning to be felt.”

Jill Colbert and the new council leadership was repeatedly spoken of in a positive light throughout the report.

In a candid interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service last month, Ms Colbert said it could take around five years before they could have a ‘strong service’ and a ‘best of class’ operation model. 

Speaking on her overall vision last month, she told the LDRS: “You can’t fix something if you haven’t got a sustained work force who aren’t invested in getting through the hard times. Because it takes a lot longer than you’d imagine.

“If you haven’t invested in trying to recruit and keep a substantive social work workforce, you’re inevitably going to have a continuous churn of children and families.

“When you strip it back, at the end of the day, we just want to do well for children.”

The Tameside One council and college building in Ashton. Credit: LDRS