Over the years my friend Yolanda Corden, who has died aged 76, made an immense contribution to the welfare of children as a senior social worker in London and, latterly, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Coventry.
She had a particularly strong impact in Hackney, where in the late 1990s she consolidated the council’s new, centrally based independent child protection unit, and at Gloucestershire county council, where she was interim head of children’s services (2003-04), transforming a badly functioning authority into one that performed well.
Yolanda was born in Barmouth in west Wales. Her father, Mahesh Desai, was a psychologist, and her mother, Jenny Halliday, was a housemother at the progressive Summerhill school. From Sherwood school in Epsom, Surrey, Yolanda went to Chiswick Polytechnic in west London (1967-69), where she received a Home Office letter of recognition in child care.
Her first post was with the London borough of Islington as a social worker, rising to be a senior social worker in 1975, and then a children and families team manager in the borough. In the early 1990s the Islington child abuse scandal had broken and in 1995 a report found that the council had failed to investigate properly. Yolanda talked with quiet fury about the eagerness of those who could have taken charge to distance themselves from what was going on, and in 1997 she left the council to work in the borough next door, Hackney.
She moved to Westminster city council in 2001 to be head of child protection and quality, and in 2005 went to Cambridgeshire county council, where she brought about significant improvement in her role as an interim assistant director of children’s social care. In 2007-08 she acted as a consultant to Cambridgeshire on a review of social care expenditure, identifying potential savings of £1.6m, and in 2009 was a member of a team undertaking a review of children’s services in Doncaster.
In 2014, just before her retirement, she became interim assistant director of children’s social care and early intervention at Coventry city council, overseeing changes that improved the authority’s Ofsted ratings and cut caseloads of children needing child protection orders by 50%.
Working with troubled and troubling children can be a daunting task, and Yolanda took it very seriously. But she was also someone who was able to have enormous fun. She was, too, immensely stylish, with a designer wardrobe and a collection of vivid contemporary jewellery.
In retirement from 2015, she spent much of her time in a house she had bought in the rural south-west of France, and which, while she was working, had become a place of relaxation and succour.
She married Roderick Corden, an architect, in 1973. They divorced but remained close until Roderick’s death in 2004. Yolanda is survived by their three sons, Caspar, Dougal and James, seven grandchildren, and her sister, Laleeta.
