Government issues changes to Working Together guidance
The Government has updated its Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance, with the revisions including “substantive changes” to strengthen how local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements work to safeguard and protect children locally.
Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, published this month, sets out key roles for individual organisations and agencies to deliver effective arrangements for help, support, safeguarding, and protection.
Outlining a summary of changes since the 2018 guidance, the Department for Education noted that chapter 1 brings together new and existing guidance to emphasise that successful outcomes for children depend on strong multi-agency partnership working.
“This includes principles for working with parents and carers to centre the importance of building positive, trusting, and co-operative relationships to deliver tailored support to families, and expectations for multi-agency working that apply to all individuals, agencies and organisations working with children and their families”, the DfE said.
Chapter 2 contains “substantive changes” to strengthen how local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements work to safeguard and protect children locally, including with relevant agencies.
Changes include: clarifying the roles and responsibilities of safeguarding partners, distinguishing between Lead Safeguarding Partners (LSPs) and Delegated Safeguarding Partners (DSPs), introducing a partnership chair role, emphasising the role of education in safeguarding arrangements and “strengthening accountability by clarifying expectations for information-sharing, independent scrutiny, funding, and reporting”.
Local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements include local authorities, integrated care boards and the police.
The Government noted that agencies are encouraged to consider the importance of voluntary, charity and social enterprise organisations within arrangements to “improve oversight, engagement, and consistency”.
The revised version of chapter 3 has a “renewed focus” on how organisations and agencies provide help, safeguarding and protection for children and their families, said the DfE.
The chapter covers three sections: Early help, Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, and Child protection.
It includes reference to young carers now recorded in school census, to reflect change in policy. Further, it includes information on the pre-proceedings stage of the child protection process, to reflect existing guidance.
On ‘Early help’, the Government noted that the approach to working with families has been strengthened throughout the guidance, outlining the role of family networks, including stronger guidance on the use of family group conferences “to improve family network engagement in decision making and supporting children”.
The ‘Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children’ section clarifies a broader range of practitioners that can be the lead practitioner for children and families receiving support and services under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, and the requirements on local authorities and their partners to agree and set out local governance arrangements.
“It clarifies the role of children’s social care in supporting disabled children and their families, children at risk of, or experiencing, harm outside the home, children in mother and baby units (in prisons) and children at risk from people in prison and people supervised by the probation service”, the DfE said.
The ‘Child protection’ section introduces new national multi-agency child protection standards to set out actions, considerations and behaviours for improved child protection practice and outcomes for children.
The revised section clarifies the multi-agency response to all forms of abuse and exploitation from outside the home, consideration of children at risk of experiencing extra-familial harm in all children’s social care assessments and includes resources to support practitioners understanding of the response to online harm.
Chapter 4 contains changes to the Prison and Probation sections, and highlights the “mutual benefits” of exchanging information with children’s social care which strengthen and clarify processes and responsibilities for child safeguarding, said the DfE.
The chapter also clarifies roles and responsibilities of health practitioners with specific duties for child safeguarding.
Factual changes include:
- Updates to Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) section to reflect existing statutory MAPPA guidance.
- Updates to the armed services section to reflect MOD responsibilities/changes to internal structures and processes.
- Removal of reference to secure colleges
- Removal of references to Public Health England
Chapter 5, ‘Learning from Serious Child Safeguarding Incidents’, clarifies the expectation for keeping in touch with care leavers over the age of 21, and the non-mandatory reporting of care leaver deaths up to age 25 to improve learning and outcomes for this group of young people, the DfE noted.
The chapter clarifies the process for submitting serious incidents notifications and the importance of accuracy to support data, reporting and learning.
Chapter 6, ‘Child Death Reviews’ contains factual changes only. It modifies language around the child death review process where the death of a child occurs in an area outside where the child usually resides.
It reflects new guidance of the coroner’s duty to include post-mortem reports with relevant child death review.
Lastly, it modifies the language around the responsibility of professionals where relevant, to inform relevant safeguarding partners and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel.
Lottie Winson
