New consultation on local and national safeguarding

The Government is consulting on changes to the wording in the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance and new regulations necessary to bring them into line with the Children and Social Work Act.

The new arrangements for local safeguarding, which became law in April, centre on three safeguarding ‘partners’ (local authorities, chief officers of police, and clinical commissioning groups).  They will replace local safeguarding children's boards (LSCBs). The provisions of the new law will:

•  replace LSCBs with new local safeguarding arrangements led by three safeguarding partners. It places a duty on those partners to make arrangements to work together, and with any relevant agencies for the purpose of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in their area
• require safeguarding partners to identify and arrange for the review of serious child safeguarding cases which they think raise issues of importance in relation to their area
• provide for the establishment of a national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. The panel will commission and publish reviews of serious child safeguarding cases which it thinks raise issues that are complex or of national importance (replacing serious case reviews)
• give clinical commissioning groups and local authorities joint responsibility for child death reviews, and enable a wider geographical footprint for these partnerships in order for them to gain a better understanding of the causes of child deaths.

The consultation looks in detail at new wording on how these multi-agency safeguarding arrangements are made locally, including which relevant agencies partners should work with and how safeguarding arrangements should work and be scrutinsed locally.

It also looks at The Child Death Review Statutory Guidance, which proposes that instead of asking whether a child death was preventable, the child death review process considers and identifies 'modifiable factors' - 'contributory factors to a death, that could be modified to reduce the risk of future child deaths.'

According to safeguarding consultant, Ann Marie Christian, writing in Nursery World last month, ‘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.’

‘Retaining strong representation from the local early years sector will be key to any local safeguarding partnership’s success’ she adds.

The consultation documents can be found here: https://consult.education.gov.uk/child-protection-safeguarding-and-family-law/working-together-to-safeguard-children-revisions-t/

The consultation deadline is 31st December.