Newsletter

Welcome to the June Safeguarding Partnership Newsletter, we are delighted you are reading this!

For those of you I have not been able to meet yet, my name is Jo Stephenson and I have recently returned to my role as the Partnerships Manager for the Safeguarding Children Partnership and Safeguarding Adults Board. As a Partnership we are really keen to communicate with all of you who play a role in keeping children and adults safe and we are looking at ways of bringing your voices into our work. We want to get better at testing the impact of what we do and sharing learning in ways that are easily accessible.

I am happy to see a wide range of items for you in this edition ranging from hard hitting domestic abuse campaigns, information on child safety from our child death review panel as well as information about new services for young people. We have also added in our book recommendations – please note these are from members of the team for your interest and due to the subject matter have adult content, not suitable for children. If you have any recommendations about media we can share such as books, YouTube and tick tok videos or resources let us know!

As ever, your feedback is always appreciated please do contact BSCP@buckinghamshire.gov.uk with your ideas, comments, compliments and feedback on how we can do better.

Jo Stephenson – Safeguarding Partnership Manager

Sir Francis J S Habgood

It was great to have over 160 people involved in the recent online conference on contextual safeguarding in May. Although virtual events restrict the opportunity for people to have conversations in between the formal inputs, it has proved a good way for us to run learning events during Covid times.

The early feedback from the conference has been very positive and it was really valuable to hear national and local views about contextual safeguarding and to hear about practical examples of what it means. If you didn’t get the chance to join the conference then information is available on the BSCP website.

The conference resulted from one of the recommendations in the BSCP thematic review into serious youth violence. The reviews used a local case study, and drew on other national reviews, to understand what opportunities were available that might have prevented the harm and risks that occurred in that case. A greater understanding of the wider context of the lives of the young people would have identified a richer source of information and options. It was good to hear that this is being put into practice in Buckinghamshire – but there are still opportunities to improve practice and the partnership will be helping to coordinate this over the next few months.

The conference really highlighted the importance of using case reviews, both in the adult and children’s safeguarding worlds, to identify opportunities to learn and to improve. Each of these reviews come with a series of recommendations that are then robustly tracked by the business unit to ensure that they are embedded. I would encourage everybody to look at the website for details of the most recent publications.

Sir Francis J S Habgood – Independent Chair for Buckinghamshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership and Independent Chair for Buckinghamshire Adult Safeguarding Board

I think we have all noticed that the nights have started to draw out and there are a couple of more hours daylight than when our last newsletter was published. The first of the spring plants have started to crop up along the road verges and in our parks, signs of things starting new and with the Governments published “road map” to recovery, lets hope that over the next few weeks things improve even more. Sticking with the current Covid situation, I can report that our partners are still working hard to support the communities of Buckinghamshire in terms of Covid recovery plans, vaccination roll outs and healthcare provision. The schools will have started a phased return of pupils which is great news to continue the recovery moving forward.

Within the Partnership Business Unit we have been very busy supporting the ongoing safeguarding work. In January we published a further safeguarding Serious Case Review (SCR) for Baby N, the report appears on our website. With regards to our SCR’s we manage an action plan template to ensure that we capture all the learning from the reviews. We have undertaken work to implement new policies or procedures that have come from SCR recommendations and we continue to develop and implement this learning, examples of such work are a revised pre-birth procedures document, the writing of a new Joint Mental Health policy between Buckinghamshire Safeguarding Adults and Children that captures working new practices regarding parenting with mental health. We are also currently working on updating a children’s neglect tool kit for partners.

On 4th March we held a learning event for partners based around all of our SCR’s which was a huge success. The day was facilitated by an experienced independent author who has a background in working in various children’s services across different Local Authorities. The event covered four main themes followed by a Q&A session to allow as much learning to take place around SCR’s and how the interaction between all the agencies that support the communities of Buckinghamshire is a really important factor in our everyday roles.

Following on from a lengthy period of consultation the BSCP has now launched the new Continuum of Need (incorporating threshold guidance) update which went live on the 23rd March. This replaces the old Threshold document and the new update is to be used to assist in assessment processes by all agencies or partners operating in Buckinghamshire. As well as the webpage version, suitable for all electronic devices, there is a printable PDF version of both the windscreen and the four levels of Need. The BSCP would make a request that if you currently display a link in your own documents to the old Threshold that you replace it with the one should below.

https://www.buckssafeguarding.org.uk/childrenpartnership/professionals/continuum-of-need/

As I mentioned in our last newsletter we were in the process of completing a Section 11 audit. This has now been completed and supported by an additional staff survey. We had a very good response from partners with regards to taking part in the audit/survey and we are currently collating the responses. We have prepared a report capturing outcomes which will be shared with one of our subgroups for further review and learning. Hopefully by the time of the next newsletter we will have published our findings.

I have been in post since February 2020 but by the end of this month my tenure in this post will have come to an end. The previous Safeguarding Children’s Partnership Manager, Jo Stephenson, will be returning in early April to pick up the reigns. Jo has significant experience in this area of business and I am sure will take the team forward in a really positive way. Lastly I just wanted to thank my team who have worked tirelessly throughout the last 12 months in difficult circumstances for us all, they are a dedicated bunch who support the wider partnership in many different ways.

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.