Incoming Rotherham children’s chief: ‘It’s the most difficult job in Britain’
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Version 0 of 1. Sorting out the “toxic” mess that is Rotherham’s children’s services is “the most difficult job in Britain”, according to the man tasked with the role, following the child exploitation scandal in the South Yorkshire town. Ian Thomas will take over as interim director of children’s services on 1 January. He succeeds Joyce Thacker, who left the council after the publication in August of a devastating report by Professor Alexis Jay, which detailed “blatant failures” by council and police leaders who turned a blind eye to the sexual exploitation of least 1,400 children in Rotherham between 1997 and 2003. Thomas, 45, who has been director of children’s services at Derbyshire council for the last three years, believes that weak leadership is at the root of the problems in Rotherham. He describes the structure of the council children’s services department as “all over the place, it’s chaos, not fit for purpose”. “I don’t think in terms of leadership Rotherham has been strong enough in challenging poor practice,” he says. “The most demotivating thing for staff is when people aren’t pulling their weight and there’s no sanctions, when management don’t take appropriate action. Some of the good stuff that’s happened [in Rotherham] has been in spite of ineffective leadership. “I think there’s been a lack of vision for children’s services here – and I have to be careful because I know the last person, and she’s a lovely woman – but the way I would couch it would be to say I would do things differently, in terms of aspiring to get the best for our kids and our families. I work on the principle that if it’s not good enough for my family, it’s not good enough for the people that we are serving.” Thomas was headhunted on a one-year contract by Malcolm Newsam, the children’s social care commissioner appointed by the government to oversee children’s and young people’s services in Rotherham in the wake of Jay’s report. He comes with an impressive reputation for encouraging creative working. This year, he was named as one of the Observer and the innovation charity Nesta’s “new radicals”, for bringing new energy, creativity and inspiration – as well as immediate results – into local government. Under his leadership, the number of children in Derbyshire who achieved five or more GCSEs trebled in a single year. Ofsted inspectors last year rated Derbyshire “good” for child protection and for its services for looked-after children, and praised Thomas’s leadership for creating “a culture of learning, support and challenge”. In contrast, last month Ofsted branded Rotherham’s children’s services as “inadequate”, its lowest rating, warning: “There are widespread or serious failures that result in children being harmed or at risk of harm.” Thomas points out how difficult his new role is. “1,400 children have been abused over a 16-year period, and recovering from that speaks for itself. The community are quite rightly outraged, there are a lot of community tensions because of the racial dimension, there’s pressure and immense scrutiny from all parts.” Meanwhile, Louise Casey, head of the government’s troubled families unit, is conducting an independent inspection of children’s services, and MPs have ordered an investigation into the disappearance of key child sex abuse files. “When you look at that, it’s a toxic mix, isn’t it?”, says Thomas. “Turning around a service that’s facing all those challenges is a daunting prospect.” According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation, Rotherham is the 53rd most deprived out of 326 English districts. A third of the town’s population live in areas that are among the poorest 20% in the country. Thomas says he hasn’t yet formed a view on why, according to current figures, Pakistani men are disproportionately involved in on-street grooming of mostly white girls. But he is unconvinced by the theory espoused by Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s lead on sexual abuse, who says the over-representation is not due to culture, but the fact that Pakistanis are over-represented in the night-time economy, working as taxi drivers and in takeaways. “The night-time economy is full of white blokes. Ninety-two percent of the people in Rotherham are white. So girls are going to come into contact with white blokes all over the place – shops, businesses, chippies. Takeaways aren’t all run by Asians, are they? You’ve got chippies. You’ve got nightclubs, bouncers, the people that own the clubs and bars. “I’m not daft enough to sit here and give an answer as to why there is an over-representation. I think the smart money is to say we need to know much more to understand it. We can postulate all day long, but when you map it out against all other cultures and religions there is a flaw in every argument. “I’m not saying I’m not going to take on any one community … Jay said people were afraid to take action because of the race element. I’m not. I’m fronting it, no matter who you are. I’m a black guy. If blacks do it, I’m fronting it. If whites are doing it, I’m dealing with it. If Asians are doing it, I’m dealing with it.” Asked if he thinks being black will make it easier for him to criticise ethnic minority groups, he replies: “It should be as easy for a white person to do as a black person. It comes down to your values, and if you’ve got a moral compass you go back to it, your moral sense of purpose tells you it’s right to act, to disrupt and to protect. So my inclination is always to protect and to safeguard kids. Our raison d’etre is that. Nothing should deter us or deviate from that.” Born in Sheffield into a family of steel workers, Thomas originally wanted to be a footballer. He signed for his beloved Sheffield United aged nine and went on to have trials for Southampton alongside a young Alan Shearer. A back injury at the age of 16 thwarted his sporting ambitions and he went to London to begin a career in public sector finance, without going to university. After a few years he returned to Sheffield and ran dance music record shops, spending his weekends at Gatecrasher and other nightclubs. He is not the only athlete in the family – his cousin is Vinnie Ennis, father of the Olympic heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill. A job inchild protection may not have seemed a natural career path. He says his desire to work with children in care stems from his nephews who were failed by the system in the 90s. “I will always champion these young people as a corporate parent and call for all sections of society to put right the failures, for which society itself is at fault”. Thomas has persuaded two of his Derbyshire colleagues to join him on secondment in Rotherham at strategic director level, to effectively be his deputies. The department has just two strategic directors doing an impossible job, he believes. “The two directors in situ at the moment have got all these services. The role of these interim appointments is to design a structure that we go out to fill on a permanent basis,” he says. Thomas wants to make Rotherham children’s services “outstanding” by 2018, although he is currently only on a 12 month contract. He explains that a new chief executive is to be appointed in the new year and then the search for a permanent children’s services director will commence. Newsam wanted him to start quickly, before that process, he says, “given the urgency of the situation”. He says he is confident that the abusers described in Jay’s report will be put on trial, pointing to three men arrested by South Yorkshire police last month on suspicion of committing a number of sexual offences against underage girls between 1990 and 2001. He admits that he was surprised by number of victims identified by Jay because he has worked directly with police in Derbyshire on disrupting the behaviour of perpetrators and bringing them to justice – and the figures there are nowhere near 1,400. But he adds: “To me the number is immaterial. It’s more about the fact it happened and those girls were neglected and abused in that way, and victims of such heinous crimes need support. One of my key priorities is to support the victims of these crimes.” Thomas insists he doesn’t want to give the impression that everything is bad at Rotherham children’s services. “We’ve got good outcomes for our children in terms of their educational attainment, we’ve got a good troubled families programme. If you want a school place in Rotherham, you get one of your favoured schools, which is a problem elsewhere in the country. And we’ve got some really excellent practice – consultant social workers, which other local authorities are just thinking about. And our recruitment and retention of social workers is really high. We have low vacancy rates and high retention, and that’s something others would die for.” Curriculum vitae Age 45. Lives Sheffield. Family Married, three children. Education Newfield comprehensive, Sheffield; HNC business and finance, East Ham College of Technology; MA in professional practice (change management), Lancaster University. Career 2011-present: strategic director, children and younger adults, Derbyshire county council; 2003-06: assistant director social care and housing, Trafford council; 1999-2003: principal accountant (social services and housing), Trafford council; 1997–99: senior finance officer, Derby city council; 1994-96: proprietor, Dance Records; 1992-94: finance and project officer, Base 51 (health information for Nottingham teenagers; 1989–92: senior finance officer (social services), LB Tower Hamlets; 1988–89: finance officer, LB Newham; 1986–87: accounts assistant, NSPCC. Public life school governor, mentor. Interests Sheffield United, music. |