There is nothing like the sense of joy, relief, pride and gratitude that hits you when an Ofsted inspection concludes that your services are making a sustained difference to the lives of local children, young people, families and carers. The inspectorate call this ‘outstanding' and they awarded the judgement to Bexley LBC last August.

Since then, we have celebrated, reflected and tried to remain grounded. One of the hardest things has been trying to identify the key milestones and changes on our journey: from inadequacy in 2012, to a fragile ‘requires improvement' in 2014, onto ‘outstanding' in 2018.