Directors of Children's Services fear shift in tone in guidance on safeguarding

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services has expressed concern that revised Government guidance on safeguarding represents a significant shift in tone that narrows focus to local authorities and social workers.

The ADCS said: “It is crucial to retain the narrative that safeguarding is everybody’s business.”

In June, the Department for Education launched a consultation on reduced guidance on child protection, claiming that the move would free professionals up from “pointless bureaucracy that has stifled their judgement for too long”.

In particular it looked at three statutory guidance documents: Working Together to Safeguard Children; Managing Cases: the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families; and Statutory Guidance on Learning and Improvement.

The Government claimed this “short, precise” guidance and checklists would replace hundreds of pages of instruction manuals. The three documents run to 68 pages, compared to more than 700 pages previously.

In its response to the consultation, the ADCS said it welcomed the more refined and focused body of guidance, adding that it appreciated the challenge of the task.

However, it expressed fears over a “significant, and detrimental shift in tone and focus away from whole system guidance and a narrative of safeguarding as everybody’s business to a focus on social workers and local authorities with support from other agencies”.

It also raised particular concerns that:

• The drafts did not adequately reflect the roles and responsibilities of all involved, particularly voluntary and community and the private and social enterprise sectors;
• The draft revised statutory guidance did not give sufficient information on safeguarding roles and responsibilities in the health system. “We regret the necessity for the Chief Nursing Officer, Department of Health, to produce a separate safeguarding assurances framework for health professionals. This is deeply concerning because it undermines the status of Working Together as the single source document for all who work to safeguard, protect and promote the wellbeing of children and young people”; and
• Better links should be made to other relevant guidance, and efforts should be made to achieve consistency of language to ensure consistency of interpretation across different items of guidance.

Amongst other things, it also criticised the Working Together guidance as weak on information sharing, and training and development requirements.

More details on the ADCS response can be found here. 

Philip Hoult