To approve the use of earmarked reserves to provide the opportunity to recruit to improve the quality of children's social work.

Cabinet has recognised that the council can support children's social care work further by enabling more staff to be recruited within this financial year. This is in conjunction with work that the council has already done to increase the number of social work posts, expand the early help service and family support service to work with families and business support to take some tasks off social workers.

The proposals in this report will enable the service to potentially recruit five social work posts (including a senior practitioner post) and a manager to provide further capacity that would be located in the assessment service and carry out assessment team work. This would enable some cases to be held in the assessment teams rather than in the child protection court teams and therefore lessen the pressure on social workers, particularly in the child protection court teams where we are finding it particularly difficult to recruit agency and permanent staff, despite all the work the council has done to improve the retention and recruitment offer.