Children and Social Work Act, Part 1: Safeguarding Arrangements - Safer laws?

After a rocky ride through Parliament, the Children and Social Work Act came into force on 27 April. It paves the way for changes to local authorities’ corporate parenting responsibilities, which include how they manage local safeguarding duties. It has big implications for the early years workforce.

Key local changes:

• LSCBs (Local Safeguarding Children Boards) are no longer required under statute.
• Local cases will now be dealt with by local child safeguarding practice reviews and Child Death Review Panels (CDRPs). Local child safeguarding practice reviews will look at ‘serious child safeguarding cases which raise issues of importance in relation to the area’, while CDRPs are tasked specifically with reviewing cases where a child died.
• Serious case reviews will be replaced by child death reviews, and these will be placed under the joint leadership of the local clinical commissioning group and local authority.

A new model of local multi-agency safeguarding partnerships will replace LSCBs. Under the new provisions, safeguarding ‘partners’ for a local authority area (named as the local authority, clinical commissioning group and police) are required to make their own arrangements for relevant agencies to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in the area.

They must also identify serious child safeguarding cases which raise issues of importance to the area and, where they consider it appropriate, arrange for those cases to be reviewed under their supervision. Their report on the outcome of the review must be published, unless they consider it inappropriate to do so, and must be given to the Secretary of State and a new national panel (see below).

Their responsibilities will also include setting a vision for partnership working, developing a model of assessing quality, a strategy for information sharing, and a model of local inquiry into serious incidents, as well as recruiting staff.

The fact that LSCBs are no longer a legal requirement means many local authorities may scrap them completely or at least reconfigure local arrangements. This may also lead to inconsistencies across the country as some authorities retain them and others choose not to.

There are fears that scrapping LSCBs completely will be detrimental for early years practitioners, as they provide a useful focal point for information on relevant local child protection training, child protection standards, thresholds and how to refer child protection queries to children’s social care. Settings name the local procedures in their child protection policies: these will have to be updated.

Key national changes:

• A national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel will look at cases which are deemed complex or of national importance.
• It will also support agencies carrying out local reviews.

The creation of a national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel will replace the nationalSerious Case Review (SCR) panel and has been designed to help the weaknesses in the current local safeguarding practices that continue to be highlighted in recent SCRs. The provisions of the act have been brought about by the Wood review, whose author, Alan Wood, former president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, says the new national panel will ‘pave the way for a national learning framework’ to help prevent the same mistakes from being continually repeated.

The new practice review panel will scrutinise high-profile and complicated cases. It will also support safeguarding agencies in completing their local reviews. This national framework, encouraging positive outcomes for children, can be introduced into daily practice in early years settings. It also encourages local authorities to work together and compare data about local deaths and analyse key themes. This is positive, not least because a lot of good initiatives across the country are not shared as local authorities are afraid of others taking their original creation and renaming it as their own. This new way of working will give the local authority an acknowledgment for its initiative and share it as good practice.

Full implementation of the act will be subject to further guidance with a revisedWorking together to safeguard children due to be issued next spring. Overall, it remains to be seen how the new local partnerships will operate and how easy it will be for early years practitioners to interact with them. This could be highly variable by area, depending on the personalities involved and historic links.

According to the chair of the Bath & North East Somerset LSCB, ‘The act heralds an exciting opportunity for local authorities and their partners to rethink how the work of LSCBs … can be done, including the potential for regional collaboration.’ So, practitioners should make their views known. If you have a good working partnership with an existing LSCB, tell it what you need for the relationship to remain effective. If you want a better relationship, write to the local authority, chief of police, or both. Retaining strong representation from the local early years sector will be key to any local safeguarding partnership’s success.

Anne Marie Christian is an independent safeguarding and child protection consultant.