Hello,
This week got off to a really busy start with the joint Ofsted
and Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection, the publication of the budget
papers, and a cabinet meeting.
Ofsted and the CQC are conducting an inspection of the local
area’s Special Education Needs and / or Disability (SEND) arrangements. The
inspection team arrived at County Hall yesterday and will be with us until
Friday. The inspectors will be visiting a number of sites, including schools
and children’s centres, and also looking at health provision, meeting with
parents, carers and children and young people as well as council and the
clinical commissioning group senior leaders and staff. As we’ve said, these
inspections are really important because they help us to improve our service
and focus on areas where we need to do things differently, as well providing acknowledgement of where we are doing well.
As you’ll have seen, the proposals for next year’s budget have
been published. A briefing for councillors takes place later today after the cabinet
meeting, and a briefing for local media was held yesterday morning. In case you
haven’t seen our budget briefing to staff, you can read it here.
At our meeting with cabinet members yesterday we discussed
the new way of delivering services to schools. Right Choice... for your school, is the new name for
our traded service and website which provides a single market place for all schools to view and
purchase the products and services they need. It is being launched at
engagement events with headteachers and business managers from all Wiltshire
schools today and next week. This is a big change – all services to schools
will be traded through a new platform from March 2018. Take a look at the
website.
At today’s cabinet meeting the car parking strategy, school
capital programme, school admissions policies, and a progress report on the
adoption service, were discussed. Cabinet will also meet again next week with
the focus being on next year’s budget. Our thanks go to Cllr Chuck Berry for his hard work as cabinet member for housing and economic
development. He has chosen to stand down, so the responsibility for housing will be taken on by Cllr Richard
Clewer and Baroness Scott will lead on economic development.
Last week we interviewed for the two
director adult care posts for access and reablement and continued support and we
are pleased to update that Emma Legg has been appointed as director adult care,
access and reablement. Emma has been acting up into this role and we are
delighted that we have been able to appoint her permanently. We have also taken
steps to appoint to the role of director adult care, continued support and we
hope to update you on progress with this soon.
This week we will be interviewing for the Children’s and
Adult commissioning role. The second tier structure implementation is almost
complete and we are looking forward to having the director posts in place and
working together to deliver the programmes of work aligned to the business plan
that were set out in yesterday’s budget briefing update.
Today Wiltshire welcomed HRH the Duchess of Cornwall to officially
open St Mary’s C.E. School in Marlborough, which was built as part of the Government's Priority Schools
Building Programme, with a contribution from us.
Finally, you can see our latest highlights presentation here.
Alistair, Carlton and Terence
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