Welcome message from Robert South, new strategic director of the children directorate

Dear colleagues,

It has been wonderful meeting and engaging with many of you since I commenced my role as Strategic Director of the Children directorate earlier this week.

My lifelong passion and enthusiasm for working with children, families and young people was sparked through volunteering within my native city of Manchester over 30 years ago. Direct experience of working with children and young people, as well as through my own family's commitment to fostering children in care, inspired my passion for direct engagement with children and families, to build positive change through hope-filled conversations, empowerment and relationship centred education, early help, and social care interventions. I was drawn to Ealing as it is clearly a place of tremendous passion, enthusiasm and hope for children and young people.

Ealing is a great place with incredible children, young people, families and communities. Your work in building/delivering the conditions and services which support, enable and empower our residents is delivering good and improving outcomes together with our residents, colleagues across the council, councillors, and partners. I feel extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to lead the Service and work with you going forward. Employing a "One Council" approach and working with our wider Ealing partnership and communities, I am certain that we will continue build upon our successes. And we must celebrate our achievements and highlight stories of positive outcomes for children and young people on every possible occasion. There is much to be proud of! This includes tremendous work and outcomes across the education sector and universal provision. For instance, 96% of our schools are rated "good" or "outstanding", and our learning partnership and associated relationships are strong and purposeful. I could go through a list of great achievements but I wouldn't want to leave out any service but I hope that you hear my positive intention.

I will be endeavouring to meet with all of you and our partners as quickly as possible via 'floor walks', team/service meeting visits, visits to children's centres, schools, youth services and others community settings. This is most important to me as I believe in the power of strong and well established, positive relationships in order to collaboratively create excellent delivery and outcomes for our residents and great working environments for us all.

Please share your thoughts, ideas and reflections on how we can continue to develop and improve our services – I'm extremely interested to understand our collective perspectives and experiences, as this will provide a very enriched evaluation of opportunities, challenges and hopes for the future.

Thank you for the warm welcome which I've already received and the fabulous energy and enthusiasm that you have shared with me during my first few days In Ealing.

I look forward to meeting you all soon as I go about the borough, but in the meantime please contact me if you have any ideas, suggestions or active initiatives which you believe will improve the lived experience of Ealing's children, young and families.

Best wishes,

Robert