Agenda item

This report presents the Medway Safeguarding Children Board (MSCB) Annual Report 2017-18 to the Health and Wellbeing Board. The MSCB Independent Chair publishes an annual report describing how agencies in Medway have worked together through the year and how effective the arrangements are in Medway to keep children and young people safe from harm, abuse or neglect. The report summarises the progress that has been made in 2017-18 and the plans to develop this further in 2018-19.

Discussion

There was a statutory requirement for all local safeguarding children boards to produce an annual report. The Annual Report for 2017-18 had been approved by the MSCB prior to having been considered by the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee and by the Medway Community Safety Partnership. The purpose of the annual report was to provide an overview of multi-agency work in Medway during the previous year. The report included an assessment by the Independent Chair of the MSCB of the effectiveness of local safeguarding arrangements and highlighting of key areas of progress and areas for improvement over the next year.

A key area of the Board’s work was the development and promotion of resources to raise awareness of particular safeguarding issues. This included production of a range of resources for professionals and volunteers working with children and families in Medway. Factsheets had been produced on child sexual exploitation, keeping children safe and on harmful sexual behaviour. The MSCB also played a key role in relation to multi-agency training for professionals. A range of training courses were provided by the MSCB, including basic/intermediate child protection and more specialist courses. In the last year, 500 people had attended a conference training session, 700 a multi-agency face-to-face session; while over 500 people had completed an e-learning course.

Safeguarding children boards had a statutory duty to undertake a serious case review where a child died or was seriously injured and where neglect or abuse was suspected or known to have been a factor. These reviews aimed to learn lessons and consider how to improve safeguarding practice. The MSCB had published two serious case reviews in the year. From June 2019, the statutory requirement for each local authority area to have a children safeguarding board would be replaced. The three statutory safeguarding partners in each area, the local council, clinical commissioning group and police would be responsible for determining new arrangements. Details of these arrangements would need to be published by June 2019 and implemented by September 2019.  

A number of questions were raised by the Board as follows:

Detail Contained in Report – A Board Member considered that the Annual Report was not detailed enough and did not include timescales for undertaking actions. He also requested that details be provided of actions taken to address underperformance.

The Director of People - Children and Adults Services advised that the report before the Board was an annual report and would therefore not normally contain the detailed information that would be included in a business plan. The purpose of the annual report was to provide an overview of the work of the MSCB during 2017/18. The Deputy Director of Children and Adults Services added that detailed action plans supported the work of the Board and that the annual report was designed to be accessible to the general public.

It was requested that the Annual Report be amended to set out that the MSCB also had a business plan and that the MSCB Business Plan and action plans be provided to the Board.

The role of other organisations – A Board Member noted the increasing role and awareness of safeguarding issues amongst other organisations. Fire and Rescue Service staff had undertaken training to help them recognise when children were being mistreated. All school staff and governing body members were required to undertake safeguarding training while the Church of England was ensuring that staff and volunteers undertook safeguarding training.

Engagement with schools – A Board Member expressed concern that only 55% of Medway schools had responded to the safeguarding audit and asked what measures were being taken to improve the response rate. It was questioned when the new audit tool would be deployed and how engagement with schools in relation to safeguarding was being strengthened. The MSCB Business Manager recognised that the response rate to the safeguarding audit had been relatively low. The audit tool had been sent to schools with the deadline for response being the start of December 2018. It was anticipated that the response rate would be much improved in view of the activity undertaken to strengthen safeguarding work with schools. The MSCB now had secondary and primary head teachers as members and the Independent chair of the Board and MSCB Business Manager had attended primary and secondary head teacher forums in order to strengthen links.

Safeguarding Assurance - It was emphasised by a Board Member how important the Council’s corporate parenting role was in keeping children safe and it was asked how assurance could be provided that everything possible was being done to identify and mitigate risks. The MSCB Business Manager said that boards had a responsibility to provide assurance that the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements in place were adequate. There were a number of ways in which this could be achieved. A requirement of the MSCB was that all agencies in Medway working with children and families completed an audit to ensure that they had appropriate measures in place to ensure that children were safeguarded. Other measures to provide assurance included undertaking multi-agency case file audits and detailed case reviews.

Renaming of Serious Case Reviews – A Member was concerned that ‘Serious Case Reviews’ would be renamed as ‘Local Safeguarding Practice Reviews’ as he felt that the new name would not emphasise their importance. The MSCB Business Manager advised that the name change was a national requirement. He considered that the associated changes would give more power to local areas to determine which reviews to undertake.

Decision

The Board considered and commented on the annual report and the effectiveness of local services in keeping children safe.