THE head of Worcestershire's under-pressure children's services says she can't "chuck money" at recruiting more social workers – revealing council chiefs believe it is not a good use of public cash to start a bidding war.

Gail Quinton, the director of children's services at County Hall, has responded to the findings of a hard-hitting independent review by insisting they are going as far as they can on recruitment.

As your Worcester News revealed last week, Worcestershire County Council decided to invite a 'peer review' team in from around the country to look at the service.

The review said where children reach the stage of being considered for care, the hunt for "alternative options is not robust or consistent".

It also warned that some social workers have workloads which are too big and suggested crucial work is "often compromised" due to "inexperience or high workloads", with some staff handling more than 30 cases at once.

To respond to a surge in the number of children going into care in Worcestershire, which has risen 30 per cent to a record high of nearly 700, the council has pumped millions into more frontline staff and has 120 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 99 15 months ago.

Mrs Quinton came under pressure to go further during a meeting of the children and families scrutiny panel at County Hall yesterday.

Councillor Paul Denham, Labour's children and families spokesman, said: "I know we've made more progress with social workers, which is good, but as I understand it we've still got around 30 vacancies where agency workers are filling the gaps.

"If each of those has a caseload of 25 kids, that's 700 kids in this county with a temporary social worker.

"These are often disturbed, abused and neglected children."

The council is trying to make the roles more attractive and is offering £4,000 'golden hello' top-ups to tempt some new staff in, as well as relocation packages worth up to £10,000.

Since 2013 pay has have been upped to compete with other councils, with newly-qualified children's social workers starting on £24,472.

Mrs Quinton said: "This is a national situation and we are on the border of neighbouring authorities in a much, worse position than us who are chucking money at it."

But she told the panel "it's not tenable, not a good use of public money" to aim to "poach" staff from other councils by outbidding them, saying local authorities have worked towards equal rates of pay recently to respond to the shortages.

She added: "There is an issue, because we've got increasing demand and you're quite right, the biggest area for us is getting a stable workforce but keeping that retention too."

In April last year the council used 37 agency workers a day, a figure which now stands at around 27.

She added: “This will continue, I don’t think any local authority can say they have nailed it, but we’re in a better position than others.

“We’re not there yet, we’ve moved from where we were but we’ve got more to do.”

She said more than 50 per cent of the workforce was newly-qualified, telling councillors the staff are young but prepared to drive the service forward.

During the debate Councillor Fran Oborski said: “One of the things that has always concerned me is the number of changes in social workers experienced by young people – it’s very hard for these young people to be stable within themselves.

“An 18-year-old care leaver is frighteningly more likely to get pregnant than go to university, in some cases it might be better to work with the birth family and keep the child in place.”

Mrs Quinton said she believed the review was “a positive response” to not waiting around for the likes of Ofsted to take a look at the service, which was rated adequate in 2012 after previously being handed an improvement notice.

“We knew there were some areas where we weren’t making the progress we wanted, and we knew there were some areas where we were – we wanted that validation to make sure we were correct,” he said.

“We gave them their view of where we thought we were, and they gave us theirs.”

She said nothing in the independent review, which was decided upon in-house and then published voluntarily, came as a surprise at County Hall.

* To see our special report into the findings of the peer review and access the documents yourself follow THIS link.