Councillor Rob Waltham, leader of North Lincolnshire Council. Photo: Steve Smailes for Lincolnshire Reporter
North Lincolnshire Council’s children’s services have been rated as outstanding by Ofsted inspectors.
The council has been awarded the highest accolade for providing services for children in need of help and protection – one of only three in the country to achieve this.
Ofsted inspectors visited the authority between June 20 and July 13 this year.
Inspectors said: “North Lincolnshire Council has impressively sustained good and outstanding services for children and families since the last Ofsted inspection in 2012.”
Below are some of the findings:
Services to children – outstanding
Children who need help and protection – good
Children looked after and achieving permanence – outstanding
Adoption performance – outstanding
Experiences and progress of care leavers – outstanding
Leadership, management and governance – outstanding
Local Safeguarding Children’s Board – outstanding
Other key findings include:
Effective direct work undertaken by a well-trained and stable workforce ensures that children are engaged fully and this leads to measurably improved outcomes
Highly effective and principled leadership clearly models and articulates ambition for children in North Lincolnshire
Very effective and coordinated partnership working at both a strategic and operational level.
Continually exceptional leadership for children’s services
The voice and views of children and young people are effectively sought and considered
The local authority is hugely ambitious and aspirational for care leavers and their views are central to development
Leader of North Lincolnshire Council, Councillor Rob Waltham, said: “To be one of only a few councils in England to achieve outstanding is incredible.
“We make children our business; they are at the heart of what we do and our number one priority.
“We are absolutely committed to ensuring they achieve the very best and at the same time are safe, protected and supported.
“We invest heavily to give them the best chance in life from excellent foster carers and adopters who make a real difference to our children in care.
“We have excellent early years’ provision, from new play areas and free swimming to new school buildings, education and learning and outstanding services to our most vulnerable children.
“We should give all children the chance and support to reach their full potential in life. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they come from, we treat everyone the same.”
Councillor David Rose, cabinet member for children, learning and families, said: “Besides the excellent work we do to support children, we also support families too, who need that extra bit of help.
“We take children and young people’s views seriously and look for ways to involve them in key decisions, for example, through the excellent work of the Youth and children in Care Council.
“Our children are keen to work with us to improve services and we listen.”
Denise Hyde, head of paid service and executive director, people and transformation at North Lincolnshire Council, said: “We strive to provide the best services to enable people to live independently, with their families and their communities.
“Everyone has worked really hard and deserves recognition for their contribution to helping to keep our children safe and ensuring they achieve well.
Mick Gibbs, director of children and community resilience at North Lincolnshire Council, said: “In North Lincolnshire, we work together with partner agencies – police, health, education and with foster carers, adopters and others to improve outcomes for children: to keep them safe, well and help them reach their potential.
“We have placed the child at the heart of what we do and listen to their voice.
Edwina Harrison, independent chair of the North Lincolnshire Safeguarding Children Board, said: “The work of the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board is second to none.
“It does everything and more that a safeguarding board should, and most importantly it puts children at the centre of everything that we do.
“I am delighted that our work has been recognised as it reflects the longstanding commitment to children involving years of hard work with full contribution from all partners.
“We will continue the good work to ensure every child and young person is safe and protected.”
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Fantasy Island Skegness has crawled into the ongoing caterpillar cat fight between Marks & Spencer and Aldi by ‘cocooning’ the Crazy Caterpillar ride in solidarity with Aldi.
Supermarket chains M&S and Aldi are currently involved in a legal battle after M&S claimed that Aldi’s ‘Cuthbert the Caterpillar’ cake infringes the trademarks of its own ‘Colin the Caterpillar’.
M&S filed a claim against Aldi in the High Court on April 14, and is suing the budget supermarket as well as demanding that Cuthbert is removed from Aldi shelves.
The company claim Cuthbert shares “substantial similarity” with Colin, and they are pledging to “protect” their Caterpillar cake from plagiarism.
Aldi, which introduced their caterpillar confectionary almost thirty years after M&S did theirs, has been posting a series of memes in response to the lawsuit, demanding that we #FreeCuthbert.
Fantasy Island, the theme park in Ingoldmells, joined in the debate with a tongue-in-cheek move, saying they will close the Crazy Caterpillar ride in solidarity with Aldi and to not offend Marks & Spencer.
The resort created a cheeky post on Facebook with #FreeCuthbert on it, truly showing which side of history it wants to be on.
It’s proved a valuable publicity move for the attraction’s social media page, with more than 4,000 ‘reactions’ to the post.
Around 15% of Lincolnshire’s adult population is now fully vaccinated against coronavirus, health bosses have said.
Lincolnshire County Council’s assistant director for public health Andy Fox said the latest figures showed just under 100,000 people had received their second dose of COVID-19 vaccine – 97,984.
Government figures on Thursday showed that officially more than 500,000 doses of vaccine had been handed out in total with 82,659 of those being second jabs – a rise of more than 15,000
Meanwhile 66.6% of the population have had their first dose – more than 425,000.
“We’re really pleased with where we are with the vaccine in Lincolnshire,” said Andy.
“We know that the NHS teams doing the vaccination has been focusing on the second dose recently so we’ve seen that go up from a few percent a few weeks ago to now we’re 15% of the adult population in Lincolnshire are fully vaccinated, which is again, really good to see.”
Of those that have received their second dose, the highest numbers are in the 80-plus age group with 36,500 people, while 17,000 75-79-year-olds are fully vaccinated.
More than 93,000 people took a lateral flow test last week. The number was expected to go down due to schools – which normally do between 40-60,000 tests alone – being shut, however, it is thought to have been balanced out by people ordering new home testing kits.
There is currently no evidence of the Indian variant in Lincolnshire, confirmed Andy Fox, while the Kent variant is now the dominant strain at 90%.
Lincolnshire’s infection rate continues to decrease, reaching 26.5 per 100,000, and now sitting below the England average of 26.8.
Health bosses are not overly concerned by small rises at district level in Lincoln, or by Boston remaining high on the league table of infection rates.
Mr Fox said the general trend continued to be moving downward.
Forensic tests by wildlife investigators have revealed the death of a bird of prey in Crowland may be linked to a criminal poisoning.
Lincolnshire Police have launched an investigation after a Red Kite was found dead on a piece of land in the area, with a member of public reporting it to the authorities.
The bird was sent off for forensic tests through the government wildlife incident investigation scheme, which concluded that indications suggest it had been poisoned.
As a result of this, Lincolnshire Police’s wildlife crime officers, as well as Natural England, the RSPB and the National Wildlife Crime Unit have carried out searches at addresses in the Crowland area.
During these searches under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, items such as banned pesticides were found, which could be linked to the poisoning offence.
Two people have been identified in relation to this and will be spoken to by officers.
Detective Constable Aaron Flint, Officer in the case has said: “Raptor Persecution is one of the UK’s National wildlife crime priorities and is taken very seriously by Lincolnshire Police.
“These offences will always be dealt with expeditiously and robustly. Deliberate killing of birds of prey is an offence which I urge the public to report if they become aware of it.
“I would like to add, that if a bird of prey is found dead and you believe it is suspicious it should be reported to the police immediately to allow an investigation into its death to commence.
“The bird may have been poisoned which poses obvious health and safety concerns if handled. Providing the police with the What3words location would be extremely useful when reporting an incident”.
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