I THINK it is safe to say there isn’t much that is more important than our children.

Yes, they run around too much, are often too loud, occasionally go loopy if they don’t get their own way and can generally be a bit of a headache-inducing menace – but still, and without fail, they come first. Certainly in matters of safety and well being.

Which is why the failings that have emerged at Buckinghamshire County Council seem so appalling.

The Ofsted report’s list of criticisms levelled against the council is long, comprehensive and makes for pretty depressing reading.

And for the many dedicated social workers in the county’s employ it must be especially disheartening to see their department condemned like this.

After all, the report’s focus is on the bigger picture of managerial processes rather than front-line failings, with, it would seem, the bureaucracy of the system, supervisory issues and lack of resources causing many of the problems.

BCC is questioning Ofsted’s assertion that children are not in the top two priorities of the authority – the authority strenuously claims otherwise. And while all that may very well be the case, something has clearly given the watchdog the impression that kids are too far down the pecking order in the council’s list of priorities. Even if, as BCC maintains, that is the wrong impression, I do wonder how that can possibly have happened.

I’m no fan of the HS2 scheme, certainly, and I hate the county’s pothole ravaged roads as much as any other poor soul forced to drive a car in Bucks. But be that as it may, for some reason the needs of vulnerable children haven’t been shouted about to quite the same degree as these points of concern.

That’s not to say that these are the top two things preoccupying the council, but they are certainly ones we have heard lots about in recent years – and that, one way or another, are inescapable for us thanks to the high profile of HS2 and the simple act of driving a car.

Conversely, most of us are lucky enough that we have not had to go through the care system ourselves – either as child or parent. Perhaps the fact that, for many, the issue of children’s social services is out of sight, out of mind, has helped the problems with the service to fester in recent years.

Well, it is very much in sight and in mind as of last week.

Wycombe’s Labour Party has – as you might expect – called for heads to roll at the Tory council and perhaps they are right.

But Cllr MacPherson, in her role for a year (presumably the rot had been setting in before then), has been quick to swear blind she will work furiously to rectify these problems (even if no one seems quite sure where the money will come from).

Which will all, inevitably, be under a pretty harsh spotlight of scrutiny, and rightly so.

As ever with these things, this bleak report will be a positive thing in the long run.

As the Keogh Review showed at our hospitals last year, a public lambasting can be the surest way of getting things moving in the right direction again when they have fallen into disrepair.

But again, if only someone could only explain how they went so wrong in the first place?