SOLACE latest to express concern over revised safeguarding guidance

The Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (SOLACE) has echoed concerns over the Government’s revised safeguarding statutory safeguarding.

Earlier this month the Association of Directors of Children’s Services warned that the Department for Education’s proposed guidance represented a significant shift in tone that narrowed the focus to local authorities and social workers. 

SOLACE said it endorsed the DfE’s efforts to produce a concise, robust and unequivocal statutory guidance. “However, we also support the need to ensure that these characteristics are not unintentionally sacrificed to the pursuit of brevity.”

In its response, SOLACE said: “It is critical that guidance on such an important matter as safeguarding is sufficiently detailed to ensure full understanding and ownership of responsibilities. As it stands, this revised guidance does not yet achieve this.”

The Society added: “In particular, we are concerned that the revised guidance narrowly focuses on the responsibilities of frontline social workers and local authorities and fails to give sufficient emphases to the role of other partner agencies, such as the private sector, community sector and faith groups.”

SOLACE called for a clear and consistent narrative throughout the guidance which left no doubt that safeguarding was “everyone’s business”.

It argued that councils and Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) should have the leverage to ensure that all parties were engaged and delivering services in a way that identified and protected vulnerable children and young people.

The response suggested that the DfE guidance was ambiguous about a number of issues, namely:

• its relationship to other key documents, such as the forthcoming DH safeguarding assurance framework;
• safeguarding roles and responsibilities within the health system; and
• who is responsible for commissioning inter-agency safeguarding training.

SOLACE added: “We are also concerned that the guidance sets out an unfounded ‘one-size-fits-all’ model by promoting independent LSCB Chairs despite a lack of empirical evidence that validates their universally positive impact. It is our view that it is possible to secure a strong independent voice for the LSCB without an independent Chairperson.”

The Society warned that if its concerns, and those of other respondents, were not appropriately addressed, then “senior managers within local government could be compromised in securing the strongest local partnership arrangements to safeguarding and promote the wellbeing of all local children and young people”.

Philip Hoult