Welcome to the NSPCC Learning Podcast, where we share learning and expertise in child protection from inside and outside of the organisation. We aim to create debate, encourage reflection and share good practice on how we can all work together to keep babies, children and young people safe.
Welcome to the NSPCC Learning Podcast. This episode is the second half of our discussion with Annie Hudson and Jenny Coles from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. In the first part, we spoke about the findings from the Panel's national review into child sexual abuse within the family environment and their annual report for 2023-24. Do listen to that episode first if you haven't done so already.
In this half, we'll look at how the Panel translates the learning from their reports into improvements for safeguarding practice. So we've been talking about multi-agency working and the challenges around information sharing, which as you said, comes up all the time through all of these reviews. Are there one or two things that you think could make the biggest difference to improving multi-agency collaboration and communication?
I think there's probably a number of things. I mean, you know, there is tension — which I know has been given — around some of the technical, kind of technological solutions. But, I mean, I think we have to be very mindful that they are not going to be a panacea. And it is much more about the kind of culture of working together that's so important. Within that, for me, it is about leadership; so leadership at a local level between the safeguarding partners.
It is about giving coherent collective leadership across safeguarding local systems. But I think it's also about national leadership. And we've come to do this in a number of our reports, including the one about Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, that it's really crucial that safeguarding is seen as a cross-government responsibility and duty, and that they shouldn't reinforce
any of the kind of silos. So, although the Department for Education has the lead in terms of children's safeguarding and, you know making sure that working together guidance and so on is regularly updated, it involves many other departments: Department of Health and Social Care, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Department of Housing and Local Government, and so on.
So we think that cross-government cohesion is really important in promoting that coherent approach to sharing information and sharing approaches. I think that's really important. But I suppose it's also about working in a culture where professionals are able to challenge each other respectfully because this is, as we've said, very difficult, complex work.
And sometimes safeguarding practitioners have to think the unthinkable about families and what may be happening, as I think this very well illustrated in the review about sexual abuse. We know sometimes people can take information too much at face value. That has been manifested in numbers of inquiries over the years.
So it's encouraging that culture where people are forever curious; that they have the good relationships with families, but they also, when necessary, can be a bit sceptical and ask that second question, third order question, about what may really be happening with children and families.
And following on from that, what is really important and comes out strongly is the need for strong and effective links between children's services and adult services. As we said earlier, that particularly came out in the annual report when we were looking at mental health needs of parents of under-fives, but actually throughout the age group. And there rightly is a big focus on transition, you know, ages 16 to 25, of young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
Adult services are often involved with parents and carers or extended family, and the really important thing is that they see them as carers or parents as well as having their individual needs, and I think that is a strong area that comes out in reviews and it's an area that clearly needs to move forward. Many safeguarding partnerships are working in that area. And I'd say that join-up at government level as well, Annie, going back, you know, is the same as it is needed at a local level.
Yes. And of course, at the national level and through the new legislation, there is a direction of travel around establishing multi-agency child protection teams, which was the recommendation from the Panel in the report we did about the tragic deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.
That report was Child protection in England, which came to the conclusion that we needed a bit of a design change in aspects of the child protection system: so to address those points that Jenny's just been making about the fragmentation and the siloed nature of information sharing, decisions, ideas about thresholds and so on; to really develop much more of a shared culture and shared way of working; to responding to these children who are at the most at risk of significant harm.
I mean, you know, one of the things we've also tried to understand and make sense of — particularly in the last two annual reports, which Jenny and I have been closely involved in — is also to recognise and speak to that context, the very challenging context of child protection and safeguarding work.
Whether that's workforce turnover, whether that's diminished budgets, particularly in relation to early help and preventative services; the fact that when an agency is under pressure, there is always that likelihood of a bit of retrenchment and not reaching out to other agencies and so on. And we know the system has been under extraordinary pressure. So we have endeavoured in our last two annual reports to really speak to and articulate that much more, haven't we?
Yes. Yeah, absolutely — and how that's impacted on engaging the children and families, having a constant practitioner involved, and how the feedback when reviews have involved families, they've said the number of people involved hasn't helped in terms of keeping that child's story at the centre of what you do. But the pressures on workforce are evident throughout. And we're not just talking about local authority workforces, we're talking about a variety of health practitioners as
well. So with that, that sharing of information and the right information and understanding — because this is complex. You know, we always talk about sharing information, but actually the complexity of that, knowing what to share but understanding it when you have it becomes even more important.
And I suppose it's one of the areas, when things have gone wrong for children, that point about information sharing comes up time and time again. I think we understand the public and sometimes the media [thinks], "well, why can't you kind of improve that and have the right systems?" And there is a point about
that. The proposal around a single unique identifier, which is in the new legislation, the Children's Wellbeing [and Schools] Bill, will help, but it's much more around having the culture and the time to reflect and work together and talk together.
Because sending an email, for example, which is often the quickest thing to do and which we all do when we're under pressure, may not be as enriching in terms of understanding and knowing what's going on in a family life, than picking up the phone and having the conversation with the GP or the head teacher or the school teacher or whatever.
And so the point about really considering and making sure that the conditions for high quality practice are in place, which is partly about workforce and having the supply of well-qualified professionals, but it's also about enabling people to have the time and the space to really reflect on what is it we know about what's going on in this child and family's life.
What is it that, you know, maybe the GP can share, or the health visitor, or the social worker, to really get that rounded and in-depth picture that is going to be a much better foundation for decisive action when decisive action needs to be taken.
Absolutely. Because you started off by talking about the different agencies and how the different agencies are working together, but the practitioners themselves will just be working for one of those agencies, and that's the context that they're working in. But then you went on to talk about, Annie, what professionals can do on an individual level when they are interacting.
So I noticed that both of your reports have these reflective questions for practitioners in there, so that you are addressing them as well as the agencies and the safeguarding partnerships and the government. Can you talk a little bit more about how you developed those reflective questions for practitioners?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we hope that the reflective questions really help practitioners and indeed senior leaders — they're not just for practitioners, they're for senior leaders and and safeguarding partnerships — to think and reflect on their practice, take on board some of the evidence we present in our reports and look at how they might change their practice.
We do consult with safeguarding partners and stakeholders around some of those reflective questions, so we make sure that, we hope, they'll be helpful. They can be used in a variety of ways. I said about talking at safeguarding partnerships, so at a strategic level, but practitioners can use them in their teams; they can use them perhaps in multi-agency meetings about how they might be working to support a particular family as well; and indeed inform any action planning in terms
of improving practice. I'd like to just give one example as well. In our forthcoming report around race and racism in child protection decision-making, there is a series of reflective questions in there which we think will help practitioners and safeguarding partners look at how they're working with various communities and children and families within their local areas. And they might be uncomfortable questions, but we hope they're practical ones, which will help them improve their practice.
Great. So that's something to look for in the report that will be published soon.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Lovely, thank you. This theme around working with children and families and all the different services that are involved with children and families, is another common theme coming out through all of your reports as well. So, you've talked a little bit about this already, but what are those main issues for practitioners when they're working with children and families where there are safeguarding concerns?
I mean, some of it goes back to the point we were talking about earlier on about the conditions of practice. So, you know, there's the obvious things about reasonable
workloads. Having access to really good supervision — and by that, I think we mean not just that somebody is making sure that they've done the right things and filled out the right forms, and that sort of bureaucratic side of protection work is important, and I would never want to diminish its significance — but it's also about having supervision that actually enables pupils to really reflect on their assumptions, their
bias within. They need to, you know... family lives can change very dramatically and very suddenly, and [they need] to really incorporate what's happened or a recent change in family in terms of what does that mean for a child. So I think that supervision is so, so important.
I do think that the proposal around multi-agency child protection teams — which of course is being tested out now through ten pathfinder areas — which is really about bringing together some of those professionals and agencies so that you can have much more of a real time picture of all the information that different professionals will have about what's going on.
I think for me, that gives us a lot of optimism and hope that we can begin to address some of the faultlines in the system that have surfaced as these perennial themes in very many inquiries and regularly in local reviews. That shift of culture and ways of working, I think, isn't going to be the absolute solution because this is really, really
difficult work. And I think sometimes people want or hope that people can look into the crystal ball and know what's going to happen next week with a child in the family. Nobody can ever do that. But what we can do is understand risk and assess risk and make the decisions the best possible decisions for a child based on the information that we have.
Yeah, I don't think I've got anything more really to add actually, Annie, to that. You know, that is the core. And from the evidence we can see, bringing professionals together and indeed co-locating them in some of the tasks that are required in terms of doing good child protection will really encourage that. That was a very clear message from the Child Protection in England review there. And we can see that played out in individual reviews as well.
And I think it's also probably important to say, although we are looking through that lens of when things have gone awfully wrong for children, and that's undeniable, what we do see is some really good and strong
practice too. Sometimes in terms of that, almost the primary task of child protection — well, one of the primary tasks — which is to understand what life is really like for a child and not to assume that what a parent may say or what a professional might think is the absolute truth, not that there is necessarily one truth. But we see some really wonderful examples of great imagination and creativity by professionals in finding ways to talk to children, to help them talk about what's
going on for them. But it's also clear that that requires that time and space and ability to go on learning and developing your skills, because children are not immediately going to talk about the horrible things in their lives, they will often clam up. And so it requires extraordinary skill and imagination for practitioners to really be able to step into that child's life, mind, experience and then to be able to make sense of it so that the right decisions can be made.
I think the other area I'd like to add, and what we've seen through reviews, probably in the last 18 months, is the inclusion of the whole family and particularly males; fathers, grandfathers and so forth.
The Panel did a review probably about three years or more ago, and that's referenced in reviews, but we can see that actually the immediate and extended family are increasingly involved in terms of the support and work and contribution to protecting children, which has been really, really good practice and good to see.
It sounds really important that, doesn't it? And absolutely it should be happening. And it must also be challenging for the practitioners, though, to be working with these wider families and understanding what's going on and who's involved and the different stories that they may be hearing from the different practitioners.
Yeah. And I think that, you know, you're getting there to the heart of the intrinsic challenge of protecting children. Making sense of those different stories and perspectives you will get from different family members, which, you know, going back to that point about engaging with children so you have a sense — harder, obviously with non-verbal children, babies and so on — what life is like for them.
But it just does highlight how it is such difficult, difficult work and how, you know, I think it was well evidenced in the stories about Arthur and Starr that suddenly things can change in a family, and how a parent is can become very different because of those changes. So, you know, you can't assume that how things were six months ago is how things are now for a child.
But that's the nature of child protection is that you have to, as I think, a social work academic said, you have to think the worst of families and the best of families simultaneously; and that's tough, I think.
And it's also the... This goes back to the importance of information sharing, that a new piece of information that comes to light, either because something wasn't known before or because circumstances have changed, and that's why it's so important that that new information is then shared to put those pieces together again, isn't it? So that then we've got a better overview of what is really going on for that
child. So we've been having a really good discussion around how challenging and complex child protection and safeguarding is, and how we need to work with children and families, and how agencies need to work with each other. So many different, important things. But how does the Panel work to influence some of these things?
Working with government, working with other national agencies in order to improve what is happening for children on the ground in the way that the professionals are able to respond.
So I suppose we do that in a number of ways in terms of the national outward look aspect of the work. Clearly, as you've heard today, through national reviews we make recommendations to government. So the two that we've mentioned around sexual abuse in the family involvement make very clear recommendations to government, and we know that they will respond when they've had a chance to digest and so on.
And similarly with the Child Protection in England report there were a number of recommendations about multi-agency child protection teams, cross-government working, aspects of working together which we felt needed to change. Again, that came through; obviously in time there was a new Working together [to safeguarding children statutory guidance] which reflected some of those findings. And then I suppose there's a broader way in which we might try and influence
government. For example, in terms of improving how information sharing operates, which may come out of the evidence from national reviews or local reviews, but where we're seeking to influence across government the way in which they're thinking — depending a bit on their priorities at the time. One of the reviews that we did about children with disabilities living in residential homes, there was some very important recommendations in there about regulation and inspection.
That review considered many children actually where they were living away from home, and therefore that adds to their vulnerability. Many of them were non-verbal or at least had alternative means of communication.
And out of that [came] very clear learning and evidence for change in the regulation of residential schools that had care and children's homes; refocusing of the inspection system by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission; and really looking at the regulation and the quality of the workforce who work in residential care. So they were very clear national recommendations as well as advocacy for children with complex health needs
and disabilities. So a real attempt, we hope, to change the national system and improve the protection of children who have to live away from home.
And I suppose that review in a way encapsulates, as other reviews have done, the role of the Panel in being very evidence-led. I mean, that's what is one of our mantras, that is about looking at the evidence and evaluating the evidence — or indeed sometimes where there is a lack of evidence — but speaking to that and using that to challenge, sometimes provoke, sometimes prompt questions about practice, but also
about policy. So I suppose we sit between looking at the granular detail and understanding that, but also speaking to the wider strategic conversations that are going on. So we're one of the players in that safeguarding national ecosystem, but working with other organisations: the associations, directors of Children's Services, College of Policing, NHS England and indeed, you know, voluntary organisations, the NSPCC.
I mean we have, I think, a developing collaboration in terms of working within our different and respective roles, but where we can kind of come together, for example, as we're thinking about in relation to neglect. The NSPCC has done some work on neglect, we are doing something. So using that, creating coalitions where coming together can create the potential for greater influence and impact in the longer term on children. And that's what we're all here to do, isn't it?
And that review we've just been talking about was done in collaboration with the Council for Disabled Children and the National Children's Bureau.
Lovely. That feels like a really perfect place to end the podcast today. Thank you very much for your time, both of you. I think that's been a really interesting discussion. For our listeners, you can read both the reports we've talked about today on the GOV.UK website, and we'll put the links to the reports in the podcast shownotes. There's lots more information about case reviews on the NSPCC Learning website as well. But no, thank you very much both for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this NSPCC Learning Podcast. At the time of recording, this episode's content was up-to-date, but the world of safeguarding and child protection is ever-changing. So if you're looking for the most current safeguarding and child protection training, information or resources, please visit our website for professionals at nspcc.org.uk/learning.