Behind social services

She is, of course, talking about the infamous £10m cuts the department will suffer over the next three years.

Next week, more talks are to be held on just where those cuts will be made - but the county hall rumour mill is already running at full speed.

"I have lost a lot of sleep over this. But you have to tell yourself that you can only do what you can. You have to come to terms with your own limitations.

"You can't work miracles. You try very hard to make sure that we are as fair as we can be and be efficient when we reduce services. 'You try to minimise the impact. We're trying as well to maintain our long-term goals, to make sure that we stay as a well-functioning, highly professional department without demoralising the staff.

"Some of my staff would say I haven't succeeded. Some of them are absolutely exhausted. People will rise to a problem and battle it and overcome it.

"And the next year they'll do it again but they get to a point where they are very weary and they want to see something different."

With more than £90m in her professional purse this year, it is still below what similar authorities are spending. Mrs Robertson admits the budget has been her biggest challenge since she joined Oxfordshire County Council.

She has been taking £3m or £4m out of the budget each year to try to balance the books and bring the department in line with Government expectations.

Mrs Robertson knows morale has been hit but says it is inevitable. It has also tested her and her staff's patience.

But she points out that despite the crisis tearing through the department, staff have remained "terrific". "We've had to reduce the number of people on the front line, particularly those working in children's services which we did last year," she says.

"They're doing more work, even though in theory we have tried to limit the amount of work coming in. But that's difficult to do."

She gives an example of how this has affected the service on the front line and admits staff have to take risks when it comes to investigating alleged neglect.

"If somebody calls us, or a teacher phones us to say they are concerned for a child's well-being because they look dirty, or uncared for or maybe appear a bit withdrawn, the social worker would have said we'll come out.

"Now the threshold at which the social worker will say we'll come out is quite high. So we do take a risk but we measure that risk.

"We know what signs indicate serious abuse but the danger also of going out and responding to every case is that you create a dependency and you are seen as interfering. Social work has always had that.

"But the budget has limited what they do. We have to prioritise and we are prioritising more and more. "They're are having to say we cannot help you. They don't come into the job to say that - they do the job because they want to help. It's all very demoralising and hard for them."

With the cuts in mind, it is hard to have any vision for the future, especially when your priorities are cuts, cuts and more cuts.

"That is my focus," Mrs Robertson says, "but at the same time I am determined to improve our services.

"I want a faster response time to cases which will then lead to a reduction in the number of people who are dependent upon us.

"We need to increase the sense of social responsibility, be more involved with our education department and I want people to feel safe and secure in the knowledge that if something happens to them or a relative, there is a service which can help."

We listen to the children

THE horrific catalogue of child abuse in North Wales made everyone realise just how vulnerable youngsters in care are.

For two decades they suffered at the hands of professional carers, their cries for help ignored.

There are currently 400 children in foster care in Oxfordshire and Mary Robertson is proud of the work social services does in this field.

She says: "I believe it is a truly wonderful service and I think it is incredible what foster parents do.

"The children can be difficult and hard work and that's not an attractive proposition so we should praise those who take this on."

But behind the scenes, physically and sexually abused kids, children with drug habits, youngsters on the wrong side of the law, are shunned by the public.

Abused children find it difficult to be affectionate with adults. Others turn to violence and damage things around the house because they are full of anger. Some will be slow to learn and will fall behind in school.

Oxfordshire has more children needing homes than parents who want to share their homes.

"We want to get the best deal for the children - that's what is most important," says Mrs Robertson.

"A lot of children are successfully placed with families. But even those who end up in our foster homes get wonderful support and turn out to be very well developed individuals."

Occasionally - and Mrs Robertson says it is very rare - a child must be found a home outside the county where it may need to be placed in a secure unit or need more specialist care for a disability. Sending a child outside the county can cost anything between £50,000 and £200,000 a year.

Care-home staff in Oxfordshire are trained to cope with violent outbursts and how to hold children without being open to claims of abuse or neglect. Their background is fully investigated before they are offered a job with children.

Mrs Robertson says: "Some with criminal records are allowed in. For example, if someone had a shoplifting offence but it was a long time ago, then they would be considered.

"We now involve children in the process. They are asked their opinions on new staff - although they never have the final say - but we ask their views and we look for people who can establish a good relationship with kids. "

But will the scandal in North Wales ever happen here?

"The abuse in North Wales happened at a time when the homes were like institutions. The children had no access to people on the outside and on the rare occasions they did they were not believed."

Mrs Robertson says: "I can't say that has never happened. But I am fairly confident it is not going on now because of the complaint procedures we have in place and the quality of our staff. Believing children is fundamental." Care for the elderly bears brunt of changes

HELPING an old person from bed, giving them a wash, maybe even changing a colostomy bag - it would never fit into the ideal job category. But hundreds of caring, committed people do it every day, and it's their service which may be hit worst by the cuts.

Mary Robertson is all too aware of the bad reaction she will receive if cuts are made. She says: "Being a home care assistant is not the ideal job at all. Going into someone's home, having no social contact, no social exchange.

"They have more work than they can cope with and they are working to strict time-scales where everything is costed and measured. They have to account for every minute of their time. It is no wonder people don't want to come into this job.

"A draft budget drawn up a year ago relied on us reducing spending on home care by £1m. But now we don't think we can make those sorts of savings.

"We are spending more on home care than other authorities but that is because we have fewer people in residential care.

"It is a deliberate policy to move people from residential care into the community or retain them in their own homes or with their families because the majority of people prefer not to be in a home. "We are going to have to look at different ways of delivering home care because the money is simply not there to pay for it. One thing we are looking at is our charges.

"The average cost for a home carer visiting a home is about £8.20 an hour. That is well below what it actually costs us when you add things like the cost of travel.

"If we raise our charges a lot of people would turn to private agencies. Some people might just reduce the amount of care they receive which means the level of care they get drops.

"Demand is pressing on us all the time in this area.

"If we want to keep the budget in balance we have to look seriously at this area. Talks are going on next week to see exactly how we can do that - if we don't do it effectively, we're going to have a major deficit next year."

Mrs Robertson hopes her department will pioneer a new scheme where home workers can gain further training and qualifications on the job and see it as a stepping stone into social work or fully qualified nursing.

Most home workers are in their 40s and 50s and female, and Mary Robertson wants to change that. She wants young people of both sexes to apply.

"They are called care assistants and they are paid less and have less status than nurses.

"We have got to make it a higher status job, provide better training, make it attractive, give it a career structure so that young people who want a career come into it because they can see a route onwards, a management structure or perhaps an avenue into social work training then professional social work or nursing.

"I would like to see people come into home care without any formal qualifications, those who have not done so well at school but want to become a social worker with our help.

"We may only have them for a few years before they would move on but they would be high-quality staff."

Death threats scare

A DECISION to close Oseney Court nursing home to save money resulted in Mary Robertson and her staff receiving death threats, she revealed.

"Poisonous and evil" letters were sent to her and others after councillors made the controversial move on the department's recommendation.

And social workers - at the forefront of abuse and threats - are sometimes given new identities after such threats.

Mrs Robertson says: "Oseney Court was very difficult. We faced an impossible budget situation and had to do what we thought was best.

"Oseney Court had problems. The building was not going to meet new standards and didn't even make the old standards.

"The cost of bringing it up to standard was the same as building a new home.

"For people who lived there and their families it was very distressing. But most have settled very well and and made a good transition to other, more comfortable homes.

"There is still a campaign to reopen the home and that is seriously misguided because it cannot function as a home. "

Mrs Robertson said in extreme cases following death threats they had to make social workers "invisible" with a different house and car or fit panic buttons in their homes.

Another tough decision is possible job losses in her own department - assistant directors who she works most closely with. She said: "The budget requires me to make savings in management costs in the next 12 months. It is hard for me but even harder for them. They are the ones who don't know what their job is going to be and I don't want to prolong that period of uncertainty.

"A lot of people have expressed concerns to me that massive changes would destabilise the department too much and I have taken that worry to the chief executive."

But on the bright side, the department receives regular letters of praise from people it has helped.

"It makes all the difficult things just a little bit more bearable when you see some of the letters we get. It also shows what great staff we have here - probably some of the most caring and dedicated you will find," she concludes.

Story date: Friday 18 February

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.