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31 October 2024

In any given year, the council looks after more than 400 children who cannot live with their birth families for a variety of reasons. 

These are children that we provide a loving home for and keep safe and strive to offer the same opportunities that we would all want for our own children. I still recall the first words I heard when I joined the council’s Corporate Parenting Committee: “Would this be good enough for my child?” and I have striven to answer that question ever since.

As a former chair of the Corporate Parenting Committee, I have seen first-hand the fantastic work that we do in this area and how hard our staff work to support children in care.

And our support doesn’t end when a young person turns 18. We also help them transition into adulthood and settle into communities.

As part of National Care Leavers Week, I want to highlight some of the many improvements we have made to the support that we offer in this area, which are making a positive difference for young people.

When Ofsted inspectors visited our Children’s Services department in November 2023, they told us that our Local Offer programme, which supports care leaves in the same way that a good parent would, needed improving.

In the past year, our Local Offer has been dramatically improved with input from care leavers and staff. It is now packed with tools, resources and support to help young people transition from care into adulthood. For example, you can access support with further and higher education, get financial advice and tips on setting up your first home. You can also get financial support for medical prescriptions and a 100 per cent discount on council tax until you reach the age of 25.

We have also increased management capacity and hired more personal advisers (PAs) to support young people. When Ofsted inspectors revisited earlier this year, they observed early signs of improvement, especially in how PAs are consistently reaching out to harder-to-engage young people.

Initiatives like the House Project are being developed to provide a base for accessing services and helping care leavers gain new skills.

We are proud corporate parents to all the children and young people in our care and just like any other parent we have high aspirations for our children and want to support and encourage them to become independent and productive members of the community.

Throughout Care Leavers Week we’ve been celebrating our city’s care leavers and promoting our improved Local Offer on our social media accounts, so please look out for this.

I would like to wish everyone a happy Halloween. It’s also scary to think that Christmas is now less than two months away!

The year is certainly flying by, but the good news is that preparations are well under way for our city’s Christmas celebrations. You may have noticed festive lights being installed in the city centre last week ahead of our big switch-on event on Friday 22 November.

The lights will complement our 40ft Norwegian Spruce Christmas tree which will form the hub of our Christmas entertainment. The lights will be switched on by Father Christmas himself, accompanied by Cheryl Fergison (Heather from Eastenders) and Peterborough Mayor Councillor Marco Cereste. Following the switch-on there will be a variety of local acts, providing fun for all the family.

I am delighted that Christmas is very much happening thanks to generous donations from all our sponsors and city councillors. I can’t wait for the switch-on event which always attracts crowds to our city centre for a festive extravaganza even though they are still refusing to let me recite ‘The Lion and Albert’.

Job seekers are invited to a Careers Fair next week where they can find out about roles available at the council.

The event takes place at Sand Martin House on Wednesday 6 November from 1pm to 3pm and 4.30pm to 6.30pm, giving visitors a chance to learn about council jobs in education, psychology, public health, finance, supporting families, HR, town planning, legal services, social care, growth and regeneration and childminding.

People have asked why we are holding such an event when there is a council recruitment freeze currently on. I point out that we run services with a £220m budget and our staff are absolutely crucial to this. The event will help to fill some of the essential roles that we are still recruiting to and raise awareness of council opportunities for when the freeze does end.

Register your interest in attending by visiting https://forms.office.com/e/4XsUV2k4yj

Regular readers will be aware that we are currently developing a revised set of corporate priorities for the council, which we recently invited people to have their say on.

A public consultation, called ‘Shaping Our City’, has now finished, and I would like to thank everyone who got involved. We had 123 responses to our online survey, lots of comments on our consultation Facebook group, as well as a series of public meetings in venues across the city generating much feedback, which we are now collating.

The council’s cabinet will consider consultation responses at a meeting in December as part of the process to agree our new Corporate Strategy and our budget for 2025/26 and beyond.

As I have previously said, there are difficult decisions to be made and this will be a theme for some time to come, but I will keep you updated on progress.