FAILING children's services in Cumbria have made 'significant' improvements but there is still work to do be done, an inspection has concluded.

Overseen by Cumbria County Council (CCC), the authority's services were deemed to be inadequate at three previous Ofsted inspections.

And in 2015, a direction notice was issued to CCC by the Department for Education, detailing a number of steps it needed to take to improve its children’s social care services.

This week, following a thorough four week examination undertaken last November, a report has been published concluding services now require improvement.

The report stated that services for children who need help and protection require improvement, services for children looked after and achieving permanence require improvement while leadership, management and governance was said to be good.

"All local authority services for children have significantly improved and overall effectiveness now requires improvement to be good," the report said. "This is an achievement, as it follows three inspection ratings of inadequate. Services for children were inadequate for overall effectiveness in 2012 and 2013 because of weaknesses in safeguarding.

"In 2015, help and protection services had improved, but services for children looked after had declined and were inadequate. The local authority has now achieved a period of continuous development in all services."

However, work remains to be and done and Ofsted has made ten recommendations, which CCC has said it is 'already working to address'.

These include improving consistency in the quality of social work practice for disabled children and working with partners to ensure that children supported by early help services are progressed for social work assessment at the right time.

Cllr Anne Burns, cabinet member for Children and Family Services, said: “This is a significant and positive step forward and reflects a huge amount of hard work since our last inspection. We know more work needs to be done; we want our services to be consistently good across the county and it is encouraging that we are already achieving that with our adoption and leadership performance.

“We are clear about what we need to do to now to take all our services to the next level, and I’m confident, given the progress so far, that we will achieve this. We are committed to ensuring the best possible outcomes for all of Cumbria’s children and young people."