To think children's centre management are a bit lazy.

[Welikebeingcosy]

All last year I kept asking the children's centres when they would reopen when the restrictions were all lifted and they kept saying they hadn't been told anything and that it could be September and then it could be January. But they never opened despite groups being given permission to reopen (we were in tier one here). I mentioned to them that they were allowed to run groups under the rules and they were like 'oh we haven't seen that, we will have a look'.
I thought I'd try and ask them again seeing as the roadmap has been released.
The woman just told me 'we haven't been given a date'. But the WHOLE country has been given a date. And the rules even state that indoor children's groups can reopen from next week up to fifteen people (not including under five's). So why are they just sitting there waiting for Boris Johnson to call them up personally and tell them to reopen or are they using it as an excuse for a nice long holiday? I even had my MP chasing it last summer and they told him they're providing support online so are fulfilling the need.
Rant over. Just drives me mad that they get away with it.

@Welikebeingcosy

Yeah and they had the cheek to put our council tax bill up by 5 percent during a pendemic....for a cut in services !

Council tax pays for social care which has cost a lot of money...

I have had the same with mental health services. From what I've read support groups can run but there's been nothing from when I was discharged from hospital last June until now. It is frustrating but the occupational therapists are waiting for confirmation they can run from management and that has not been forthcoming.

Yeah also my gripe has nothing to do with the woman on the front desk. She was the only one giving me information hence she was the person used for the narrative of the dispute. It's the information she has been provided with which I'm angry at. At least a provisional date and some transparency would be good to look forward to. Clearly the ones having a go at me calling me a public services basher don't have tiny children on a low income to provide essential social interaction for during a pandemic. I'm hardly bashing all services. I just think this decision makes zero sense given the government guidelines and the fact that everything is paid for by the tax payer so they wouldn't have even been hit financially this past year and therefore should be in the strongest position to provide support to those of us struggling.

@Welikebeingcosy

We're not talking about vulnerable people though we're talking about mums mostly in their teens 20s 30s and 40s with small children. If every other organisation in the area can do it, why are the council staff so incompetent to use the creative brains they were chosen for the job with?

I'm 45 and classed as vulnerable just to point out you never can tell. We need to understand the bigger picture here. A private run group (assuming they have paid staff and aren't run by volunteers) will have one venue, a relatively small number of staff and therefore it's much easier to do a a risk assessment, get safety processes in place and work with staff/clients to reopen. Councils will have a multiple children's centres to assess and reopen and each of those will need to be done specifically for that building, staff and client group. That plus they are supporting schools, children's homes etc to reopen as well as trying to provide the basic level of support to children and families at risk. Councils don't have large numbers of admin staff sitting around with the skill set to do this quickly so, unfortunately, it may take some time. I would love that council services were properly funded so that they could provide all the services that people need but unless we are prepared to have a specific conversations about raising taxes, that's not going to happen. I'm not sure you can compare doing a risk assessment for a mainly outside space such as a campsite and (I assume) not during a worldwide pandemic with the current situation but if you think you have all the answers, again, I suggest you get a job at the council.

I also am particularly infuriated now of this is a LA decision because when I was on a child protection plan for my daughter having returned to the country with a newborn and no housing options, they made a continual point to bash me for wanting to rest and take walks recover from my travel and stress, rather than take my three month old to multiple baby groups at the children's centres each day , and made a point in court to say I was depriving my child of neccessary social development. And yet now they are the ones who refuse to reopen those services when we actually need them having a toddler to keep happy! Makes me grrrrr at their hypocrisy.

I'm a bit frustrated that there seem to be no plans to reopen libraries around us, it's not as if it's a huge surprise. If not now, then when? Is what worries me.

Criticism is fine and welcomes but needs to be done from a position of trying to understand the issues involved. Starting a thread which accuses people who are in the end, just doing a job, of being lazy, not wanting to work, just sitting around being on FB strikes me as exactly a bashing thread. I have huge amounts of sympathy for people who have had access to key services taken away from them but I find it unhelpful to throw around the (depressingly) normal attacks at staff. Social services and child related provision has been vastly underfunded for decades. I worked in local government over 15 years ago and budgets were being slashed about 10% each year from central government and I fail to believe that those resources have been replaced in the last 15 years. We also need to take into account that resources will have been spread even further due to the pandemic. I do appreciate none of this helps if you are the person who can't access services but I do think it's important that we try to understand the situation that people who work in these areas find themselves. I've never met anyone working with children who didn't want to do everything they could to help those families and it's insulting to call them lazy in my opinion.

I should say that I know in most LAs a lot of the staff were re-deployed to work on Covid-specific projects. But where I work (not the LA I live in) those have been wound down - things have settled down and those staff are now needed back for the regular services. It needs strong senior management which sadly not all authorities have.

My LA sent someone round to our estate to tell tenants off for having doormats outside their front door. If they've got time and the resources for that there's no excuse...

You would think the manager of each individual children's centre would be qualified enough to do a risk assessment. They have to do them anyway for each activity they run in normal times. In my area they've got the libraries and leisure centre reopening and they haven't had any difficulties.

The workers from the children's centres in our area are still temporarily redeployed providing family support to families at home, as the demand during covid has been huge.
Everyone I know who works in the LA has been pushed to the limit in the last year, working excessive hours with no extra pay and covering for colleagues who are shielding. OP you need to give your head a wobble.

Well they aren't in my area because this was investigated by my mp as to what support was available to families here, and the answer was a zoom cooking lesson for dads, so I'll keep my head firmly in place (whatever give your head a wobble means...) thanks.

Quite outing but our three year old swimming pool has a leak. Did they use lockdown period to fix it? No of course Durham wouldn't do that! Let's start to fix it now. Might reopen some time next year 😔

@Welikebeingcosy So what was the outcome from your MP investigation?

Honestly your post is really offensive to those of us who have been working ourselves into the ground during this pandemic. You don't have a clue.

The risk assessments are centralised at the local authority. Each manager isn’t doing their own, they all have to go through the H&S dept (or similar) Lots of staff in children and young people’s services have been redeployed too, to teams other than their usual workplace, to maintain statutory frontline services. Local government moves slowly unfortunately.

@Welikebeingcosy

We're not talking about vulnerable people though we're talking about mums mostly in their teens 20s 30s and 40s with small children. If every other organisation in the area can do it, why are the council staff so incompetent to use the creative brains they were chosen for the job with?

So unvaccinated people then?

Also nowhere was in tier one in January.

I wonder how DD's volunteer brownie leader is able to do the covid risk assessment yet a senior manager of a children's centre cannot. Head teachers have to do them after all.

@PotteringAlong

I don’t think it’s just a children’s centre thing. From Monday, gyms and swimming pools can open. Are Gateshead council opening their gyms and swimming pools? Are they balls...

There ought to be some sort of inquiry into Gteshead Council. Even last year when other pools etc were opening they didnt.

I'm fucking livid.

In my area they are open over half term for children who are in receipt of free school meals for bookable activities. Then they close again.

Haenow do you think social care costs have gone up during the pandemic? Genuine question - lots of elderly people have died sooner than they would have done but presumably there are increased costs in delivering care safely.

@Theshoepeople as I already mentioned above, that you could get a video cooking lesson for fathers and this was adequate support for the entire area of families during lockdown. You seem to be mistaking me for someone who prioritises offending someone who gets paid for their work over the welfare of my tiny child.

@welikebeingcosy the workers in our area and all neighbouring authorities have been redeployed to either work in the child protection teams, or to supervise contact between parents and children in care in centres that are 'closed' to the public (Ie childrens centres that aren't providing their regular services)

Some CCs in our area are completely closed because the room sizes + number of staff required to open safely can't be met with distancing requirements.

I'm not sure what you think I'm mistaking you for as your last sentence doesn't make much sense, but I'll repeat that you're out of order saying that public sector staff are being 'lazy'. You can be unhappy about covid affecting your child. You are wrong to make posts slagging hard working people off on mumsnet because you're fed up.

Right so you're trying to tell me that someone who was trained in singing Humpty Dumpty to toddlers is suddenly being put on child protection teams with no experience and training and that somehow because of a pandemic the contact centres need extra staff? And I know those contact centres are after school hours so that has nothing to do with running three or four toddler groups a week. It might be the case in your area that they're super hardworking for their paycheck, but here the staff are doing YouTube videos playing in their backgardens.

In my local authority they shut all the public toilets when lockdown one happened. They are still ‘temporarily’ shut now and never reopened during the summer. All the other neighbouring local authorities opened their public toilets last summer.

All of the children’s centres in my local area were shut years ago so we have no service to miss!