JOBS in Dorset’s children’s services teams are likely to be safe in the coming year – despite having to make more than £4 million in savings at a time of rising demand.

The reassurance comes from executive director of the service, Theresa Leavy.

She said although there might be occasions when vacant posts were held for a while for a ‘rethink’ overall job cuts were not expected and there was likely to be some growth in positions.

“At present none of our savings targets include cuts to people,” she said.

Ms Leavy said that the department was now four years into a five-year transformation plan which has been achieving good results – often through offering early help and support for struggling families, saving money in the long-term by avoiding situations escalating.

“We believe we will be able to make those savings. It will be challenging; it will be tough, but, as you know children’s services put their shoulders to the wheel,” she said.

She told a scrutiny committee on Friday that an investment of £4.2m had seen an estimated £19.5m ‘return’ with the service attracting £7.4m in external funding during the year, the biggest single amount of around £5m on a two-year Pathfinder project where Dorset is one of three pilot councils from across the country.

“The reputation of Dorset national has been very positive for us,” she told councillors with the highly-rated service attracting support from the Government when new ways of working were being tried out.

Ms Leavy said that her team has recently managed to leverage another £440,000 for the Pathfinder work, persuading the Government that to be successful it needed to be better funded.

She said that in the coming year her teams hoped to help keep more children with additional education and physical needs stay closer to their homes and, where possible in mainstream schools, and were likely to see more use made of the Coombe House special school, near Shaftesbury, which Dorset Council bought for £10m when it ceased trading as a private school.

The director said there has also been successes in recruiting more foster carers and making better use of ‘kinship care’ where family members support children, or young people, where their parents are unable to do so.

The pathfinder project aims to keep children in need of care being supported to stay within their family, although not necessarily immediate family.

Corporate director for care and protection, Paul Dempsey, has previously told councillors that the Families First Children Pathfinder project was based around the concept of supporting families to unlocking their potential to support their own kin.

He said that the strategy involved developing a multi-disciplinary family help service; establishing a multi-agency child protection team; unlocking the potential of family networks to support children and putting love, relationships and a stable home at the heart of being a child in care.

Some of the money in the two-year programme will be passed to the police and health to assist their work with the programme; some will be used to pay for additional Family Help and Child Protection places and to enhance learning and development work for staff.

Said Executive director for children’s services, Theresa Leavy at a previous meeting to outline the advantages of the project: “It is absolutely obvious, when you look at the figures, that the cheapest, most effective, best outcome way, is to keep children within their extended families. It’s a no brainer.”