by political editor Paul Francis

Kent County Council has spent more than £11m on temporary social workers in just a year as part of its drive to turn around failing children’s services.

And the costs are likely to continue rising in the short term as social services chiefs say the authority still needs to recruit more permanent social workers to plug gaps.

The council’s total costs for agency staff recruited to children’s services last year was £11.4m, of which £9.6m was spent on frontline social workers and administrative staff.

Of that, some £2.2m was spent drafting in a 30-strong specialist team to tackle a chronic backlog of 2,700 cases where vulnerable children had not been allocated a social worker.

The remaining £1.6m was spent on looking after child asylum seekers.

The council was forced to act after a damning Ofsted report in late 2010 criticised the standard of safeguarding for the county’s most vulnerable children.

Ofsted has since commended the authority for its steps to improve services, saying in a recent return inspection the council had tackled all the major areas of concern - including the recruitment of social workers.

Cllr Jenny Whittle (Con), the cabinet member for children’s services, said the costs of using temporary staff would come down as measures to reduce the number of children needing care took effect.

"I am not prepared to reduce the number of social workers which would increase the workload on others. When we have preventative measures in place, that should see the number of children coming into the system reduce. Agency workers cost twice as much as permanent staff and while we have seen an increase in the number of experienced social workers appointed, we need more."

The council was aiming to reduce the number of children in care by 350 by 2015.

As part of a recruitment drive, KCC is now offering ‘golden hellos’ of £2,000 to newly-qualified social workers. Frontline staff who work in child protection are also eligible for annual lump sum bonuses of up to £3,000 a year if they meet targets set for dealing with cases.