Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter, I hope that you find the new joint feature between safeguarding adults and children working for you. It’s been two months now since our new joint website went live and we have received a number of positive responses about how it looks, how accessible it is and the information to hand. If you have any thoughts on that then please let us know. Since our last newsletter we have published our Annual Reports for both the Safeguarding Adults Board and Safeguarding Children Partnership, both have been published on our website should you wish to read them. The reports have been produced in a shorter format than normal to try and ensure the information contained in them is relevant and provide the reader with a good overview without spending a lot of time reading many pages of information.

Unfortunately Covid remains at the centre of a lot of work being undertaken by the multi-agency partners as they continue to work across the front line seeking to deliver a really good service to those more vulnerable sections of our community. We have just come out of a second lockdown period and during this period the Business Unit have continued to support our colleagues at every opportunity . If you do your own research you will see that the numbers of cases has risen in Buckinghamshire, so I would encourage and urge you to ensure that you follow Government guidelines laid out as we move into the Tier structures that the Government have implemented and support others around you if you are able to do so.

The week of the 16th November was national safeguarding adults week and we posted a series of daily updates covering a range of subjects providing information to the public and professionals alike. I hope that this approach provided some support to those who were seeking some guidance around this subject during that time. We also launched our Section 11 Children’s Audit earlier this month, I won’t discuss that further here as I know the lead on this for us has placed a news article herself to let you know all about it.

On the 8th December we published a further serious case review in to the death of Child V. You can find the full report here.

As the nights draw in we can see Christmas on the horizon rushing towards us, so no doubt our keyboards will be working overtime to ensure we get all the gifts we are hoping to buy, to say nothing about the food !! I appreciate its early but the next newsletter won’t be out till next year so here’s wishing you all a safe festive period.

Hello everyone, you should be reading the latest edition of our newsletter on our new joint safeguarding adults and safeguarding children website.  This new venture has only just gone live and we have decided to join both the adults and children’s worlds together using the platform of a joint website. The new website conforms to the Government Accessibility Regulations so hopefully your user experience should be enhanced and you will enjoy a better experience of a more modern looking website. We have also made the decision to have a joint newsletter covering all aspects of the work we do which will be a change for the adults world as there has not been a newsletter covering this area for a while. Due to the change in website format you will also notice a change in how the newsletter is published.

Our new front landing page provides you with various information and news updates  before giving you the option to look at something in the adults or children’s world or even look at the training we offer. This has taken some time to get off the ground due to the amount of work involved and reviewing all the data that we held on the two old websites. I think there will still be some improvements that we can make once we are up and running, so if you have any suggestions then please get in contact.

The safeguarding team are still continuing to work from home in these strange times and with schools having just gone back we are starting to get on track again with some of our core business, one area being training to educational settings. We have also just completed our adults and children safeguarding annual plans for 2019/2020 which captures the work of the business unit and the work undertaken to support the multi-agency approach to safeguarding.  We have also published another serious case review which you can find in full in the relevant reports section under the “Documents” tab. This is a thematic review and covers the topic of serious youth violence in Buckinghamshire with a view to a wider national context.

As we can see from the national news we are still subject to Government guidelines with regards to Covid 19 and the front line services of the Council continue to support communities at every opportunity.  It is important that we all help that process by abiding by Government guidelines, whether that be about hygiene or public spaces/gatherings.  Help us keep those most vulnerable safe in these difficult times.

Vince Grey

Safeguarding Partnership Manager