Stopping child sexual exploitation in Birmingham is one of the biggest challenges facing child protection workers, council chiefs have revealed.
Ensuring key systems were in place to monitor and protect children at risk of harm would also be a challenge between now and next March, education scrutiny committee was told.
The revelations came as both the council and Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board unveiled two action plans in a bid to keep the city's children safe from harm.
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The board's 19-point action plan aims to boost the services provided to protect vulnerable youngsters over the next three years.
It will give priority to four key areas - in particular doing more to help vulnerable children have a "voice".
The business and improvement plan includes steps to "make children safe at the front door" and to improve interventions so there are no delays in helping children at risk.
Jane Held, chairman of the board, said: "One of the core challenges of 2014/15 is developing work to combat child sexual exploitation in Birmingham and across the West Midlands."
It was revealed earlier this month how experts feared child sexual exploitation had been happening in the city for 40 years.
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And a bombshell confidential police report claimed 75 per cent of known on-street child sex groomers in the West Midlands were Asian - with 82 per cent of victims, aged 14 to 16, said to be white.
It echoed fears that grooming had been happening on a similar scale in Birmingham and the West Midlands to that which happened in Rotherham and Rochdale.
Meanwhile, Peter Hay, the council's strategic director for people, said one of the key challenges to turn around the council's beleaguered children's services department would be to recruit and retain social workers.
"The next few months will be crucial with issues about resourcing, multi-agency work and continued organisational design being tested," he added.
"At the heart of these issues lies something of a paradox: we have too few social work staff doing too much work - although we are beginning to address the resource position in line with the clear priority set by the council."
It comes after a huge temporary pay increase paid to agencies providing children's social workers has been made permanent as desperate council bosses struggle to fill 156 vacancies in Birmingham.
The council's children's services department has been rated 'inadequate' for the past five years and was branded a "national disgrace" by the Government's chief inspector of schools last October.
Failings by social workers and other child protection staff were highlighted in a series of serious case reviews into the death of children, including Keanu Williams and Khyra Ishaq.