Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board Annual Report January 2011 March 2012 Executive Summary www.kirkleessafeguardingchildren.com
Foreword As the Chair of Kirklees Safeguarding Children s Board, I am pleased to introduce this Executive Summary of the third annual report of the Board. I took up the role as the Board s first Independent Chair in April 2010, and continue to be impressed by the commitment of all Board partners to improve safeguarding arrangements in Kirklees and to ensuring that the best interests of children and young people remain the primary focus of the Board's work. The full report is available on the website www.kirkleessafeguardingchildren.com Over the last year many of the Board partners have faced major change with budget and substantial resource reductions as well as organisational restructures and national changes for the NHS. These changes have brought about a number of challenges but partners have remained committed to the safeguarding agenda. In light of the changing work environment, this has brought about changes to the Board membership. We welcome the opportunity to balance experience and knowledge with new members and their perspectives that bring a fresh view and challenge to the Board's work. The board continues to remain committed to listening to the voices of children and young people and involving them in recruitment to Board posts where their contributions, directness, openness and honesty are invaluable. Serious Case Reviews are an integral part of the Board s work with important lessons learned from these reviews and the Board overseeing the implementation of the relevant action plans. Another key area for the Board is multi agency training and the development of its programmes and tools to ensure each agency is delivering a thorough in house training programme. There are a number of changes taking place across the safeguarding agenda with the publication of Professor Munro's report and the financial and organisational challenges. Following good local inspection outcomes the Board embraces the emerging changes and Kirklees continues to have a strong commitment to safeguarding children across partner agencies and will move from strength to strength. Bron Sanders Independent Chair Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board
Annual Report The full annual report provides evidence of progress against the Board's objectives as set out in its Business Plan, as well as progress in response to the complex and ever changing safeguarding agenda. It also focuses on the impact of this progress, identifies areas where work is still needed and sets out the future priorities of the Board. This summary gives a brief overview of the work of the Safeguarding Board and its objectives highlighting the challenges facing the Board. The performance and quality assurance mechanisms along with the Board activities also feature. The summary concludes looking forward to the key issues for 2012-2013. Governance The Safeguarding Board has robust governance arrangements in place. In order to strengthen and support the work of the Board there are a number of workstreams which are chaired by a Board member. There are good strategic links between the Board, the Children s Trust and the Health and Well-being Board. Priorities The Board has a three year business plan which is reviewed on an annual basis. The plan is available at http://www.kirkleessafeguardingchildren.co.uk/busi ness_plan.html There are six objectives in the plan along with an overarching theme for 2010-12 with specific focus on neglect. This was chosen because it was recognised improvement was needed in multi agency approach to working with neglectful families. Below are the objectives and the challenges for achieving these objectives. Objective 1: Strengthen and develop the partnership approach to safeguard and promote the welfare of children: Progress / Impact: The work of the partnership has progressed and has maintained its function due to the support of the board partners both in their time commitment and financial contributions. This has enabled the workstreams to meet the objectives of the business plan. Challenges: Due to changes in roles and reorganisations the Board has experienced a significant change in membership. The challenge is to ensure continuity of the Board s business and priorities. A board development day would assist in promoting the strategic focus of the Board and enhancing partnership working.
Objective 2: The incidence of child abuse and neglect is minimised: Progress / Impact: Those engaged in professional safeguarding activity are equipped with clear working guidance to enable them to assess and recognise risk. The workforce is safeguarding children well. They are kept up to date with new initiatives as technology and the understanding of society changes to enable an informed and appropriate response. For example a first responder guide to e-safety incidents has been developed and distributed. Challenges: The challenge is to ensure an equipped workforce as the changes are implemented to government guidance. This will require joined up local policies and procedures with our neighbouring boards along with appropriate training for staff to develop their professional judgement. Objective 3: Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of what is done by the Local Authority and Safeguarding Children Board partners Progress / Impact: The Board has undertaken audits to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of safeguarding work in partner agencies and has brought challenge and made recommendations accordingly. Challenges: The Ofsted inspection report made reference to the performance information primarily emerging from Children s Social Care. The challenge is to develop a data set that incorporates a multi agency focus. Data collection needs to include issues relating to teenagers together with appropriate audits or case reviews in order to maintain the focus on this coming year s theme. The Section 11 process needs to maintain its challenge and relevance and ensure that it is a coordinated process by the West Yorkshire boards. There is a challenge to ensure that all schools and colleges meet the expectation to complete an annual safeguarding audit and offered safeguarding training and support regardless of their status in the current climate of change. Objective 4: Communicating the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and promote the work of the KSCB Progress / Impact: The board and the workforce have been kept up to date with relevant practice, emerging themes and key dates which has enabled planning for safeguarding issues within their organisations. Children and young people, their families and the wider community is informed about safeguarding and what to do and where to access help. Children and young people have been actively involved in promoting safeguarding messages. The voluntary and community sector have dedicated guidance that will enable them to work through the safeguarding challenges for their organisations.
Challenges: Increasing engagement with the voluntary and community sector and specifically with faith organisations to support their safeguarding awareness and activity. Also to ensure that partner organisations are considering the views of children and young people in their service planning and in their processes. Objective 5: Review and investigate all serious incidents against children in Kirklees Progress / Impact: Learning from serious incidents has been cascaded widely to organisations and their workforce. Campaigns arising from child deaths have been supported which have raised awareness of risky behaviours in parenting. The workforce and the wider community will have increased knowledge and understanding of keeping children safe and the factors that contribute to risk and how to respond. Challenges: Developing Serious Case Reviews under the new proposed guidance. Ensuring there is appropriate challenge and scrutiny to maintain the standards of reviews in the absence of evaluation from Ofsted. To take forward the promotion of genetic counselling in order to reduce the number of child deaths. Section 11 of the Children s Act 2004 ensures responsibilities are met to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Objective 6: Develop the skills and knowledge of workers in relation to safeguarding children: Progress / Impact: Through implementing our multi agency training strategy and advice support and training strategy for schools we have a workforce who has been able to access current and relevant training incorporating national and local information which has equipped them with increased knowledge to apply to their practice and improve safeguarding of children, young people and families. Challenges: To find more ways to make training accessible and then to evaluate the impact of the training through management supervision. To engage those schools and colleges who are independent of the Local Authority and promote the expected standard of safeguarding practice and training. Specific Focus: Neglect Progress / Impact: Partner agencies have worked hard to improve safeguarding practice and can demonstrate increased staff awareness of signs of abuse and neglect, parental factors that may pose a risk to children and what staff should do if they are worried about a child. There are more opportunities for practitioners to consult with key services, better sharing of information between agencies and significant improvements in capacity and expertise across agencies. These improvements are part of a positive culture of improving practice in working with families, particularly with children that may have unmet needs or experiencing low-level neglect.
Challenges: Neglect will continue to present challenges to professionals because each case is so varied and complex. There is no single cause of neglectful parenting and most neglectful families experience a combination of issues that may include domestic violence, substance misuse, mental ill-health, learning difficulty, poverty, poor quality housing etc. Neglect is often considered to be a symptom of entrenched disadvantage that is unlikely to be eliminated, but the Board will continue to make efforts to alleviate the effects of neglectful parenting on children, and support individual agencies to deliver services to best meet the needs of local children. Performance Ofsted Inspection The services for Safeguarding and Looked After Children were inspected in November 2011. The purpose was to evaluate the contribution made by local services towards ensuring children and young people are properly safeguarded and to determine the quality of service provision for looked after children and care leavers. The findings were that the overall effectiveness of services in Kirklees for safeguarding children and young people is good and the capacity for improvement is good. The inspection noted areas for improvement by the Local Authority and its partners and an action plan is in place which is monitored by the Safeguarding Board. Safeguarding and Quality Assurance Activity Each agency has its own external quality assurance activity with the information regularly collated for monitoring by the Evaluation and Effectiveness Workstream of the Safeguarding Board. If an agency or service is demonstrating performance outside of accepted parameters an exception report and action plan is requested from that agency. Performance Monitoring There have also been two pieces of auditing work achieved this year as well as the Section 11 process and challenge event. These were an audit of Initial Child Protection Conferences and an audit of Common Assessment Framework. Both of which demonstrated good practice and also concluded with recommendations for further improvements. In relation to the Safeguarding Board the inspection highlighted the quality of training, management of serious case reviews and performance management provided by the Board.
Kirklees Safeguarding Board Activity The Board has a range of activities that it is working on and the progress and challenges for these activities can be found in the full report. The areas of work include; - The voice of children and young people - Learning and development - Safeguarding in education - Serious case reviews - Child death overview - Communication - Voluntary and community sector - Links with adult services - Domestic violence - Managing allegations - Child sexual exploitation and children missing - E-safety - Regional work Looking Forward The work of the Board is continually moving forward and bringing new issues and challenges each year. The focus for 2012 and beyond is to continue with the core business of the Board whilst building stronger links with its strategic partners. These include the Children s Trust, the new Health and Well-being Board, that will be statutory from April 2013, and the Clinical Commissioning Groups. Ensuring the board continues to develop and respond to change is key to its progress as is engaging all partner agencies in committing to the board priorities and objectives. It is also important to maintain and develop working across regional boundaries and keep up to date with procedural changes. Key Theme for 2012-2014 The Board has identified Safeguarding Teenagers as its new theme. This has been chosen to underpin objectives in the business plan and because it has been a consistently recognised issue over the past year for the following reasons:- - Young people aged 14 years and older have been an area of focus from serious case reviews evaluated by Ofsted. - Sexual exploitation primarily affects this age group - Following the priorities within the Children and Young People Plan - Identified improvements by Ofsted in engagement with children and young people. - The Section 11 audit identified a lack of coordinated consultation with children and young people in developing and shaping service provision.