Leaders stressed the importance of ‘quality over quantity’ in children’s services staff as they detailed the reasons behind a smaller social care workforce.

The department at Southampton City Council has reduced its full-time equivalent posts by 55 from 643 to 588.

This equates to an 8.5 per cent drop over the past 12 months.

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At a recent meeting of the council’s children and families scrutiny panel, chairwoman Cllr Amanda Barnes-Andrews said: “We talk about transformation. We know what that means. Basically, it means fewer employees.”

Deputy director for children’s services Steph Murray explained: “In our restructure we have actually deleted unfunded posts and vacant posts.

“Because our demand has come down, the need to keep those posts has reduced and our case loads are fine. Not in all areas, there are some that are too high in some teams, but we’ve really carefully managed the size of our service to meet the demand that we’ve got.”

The senior officer told councillors there were previously as many as 95 agency social workers and this figure now stood at 12.

She said: “Many of them were supernumerary staff, they weren’t all filling vacancies. Some of them were extra to deal with demand.”

Ms Murray said the approach to the transformation of children’s social care was about doing things differently rather than a focus on headcount.

This included putting energy into family group conferencing and introducing family coaches who work with parents to help children returning from care as part of the the pathways through care team.

Cabinet member for children and learning Cllr Alex Winning said the transformation had been a long journey which started earlier than in other parts of the authority because it had to.

“I know on the surface it seems we have got fewer staff than we did say five years ago, which is probably true, but if you look at where the service was five years ago the quality was pretty poor,” Cllr Winning said.

“It is about the quality rather than quantity. We’ve had a big workforce for quite some time in the past and we weren’t getting great outcomes.

“Now it is all about honing in on the quality of staff and the stability and dedication of those staff as well.”

A spokesperson for the local authority told the Local Democracy Reporting Service a rising demand post-Covid saw the council take on additional staff.

Over time, demand has steadily reduced to pre-pandemic levels and the need for the extra resource reduced, the spokesperson said.

On the smaller workforce, they said there had been very few redundancies and no impact on service delivery, with manageable caseloads and good quality support provided to families.