A new Ofsted assessment of Birmingham City Council’s fostering service has found it to be “good” overall with several areas judged “outstanding”.

The growing use of personal budgets and direct payments for social care may prove a way of quietly cutting services, a study published by Unison, the health service union, warns.

Social workers do their utmost to protect the most vulnerable children in society, County Hall said last night.

A grandmother has won the legal right to the same rate for looking after her granddaughter as would be paid to a foster carer with no family connections.

A 50-year-old Bedfordshire man died in a car fire in the grounds of a care home in Cambridgeshire, a coroner has said. Fidelis Mando, of Plaiters Way, Houghton Regis, was in the car which caught fire at Dray House care home in Cambridge Road, St Neots, on 1 May.

The co-owner of a Herefordshire care home has been arrested on suspicion of neglect. Madhu Menon owns Rosedale Retirement Home in Ross-on-Wye with her husband.

Council chiefs have ‘revolutionised’ the way social workers record cases after a former employee was struck off. Alcus Dunn is banned from practising as a social worker after a catalogue of failures while working for Herts County Council.

Children’s services staff at crisis-hit Doncaster Council have been offered voluntary redundancy as part of plans to redirect £700,000 to improve safeguarding services.

One of the longest-running legal cases in UK history, centred on systemic sexual abuse at children’s homes in the north-west of England, is poised to end after a judge found in favour of two men who claimed they had been sexually assaulted while in care.

A social work degree student has spoken out after being thrown out of his practice placement just because he writes a regular column for BASW’s Professional Social Work magazine.