Podcast: The work of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel

Intro:
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.

Host:
Welcome to the NSPCC Learning Podcast. In this episode, recorded in February 2025, we'll be speaking with Annie Hudson and Jenny Coles from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. At the end of 2024, the Panel published two new reports: a national review into child sexual abuse within the family environment and their annual report for 2023-24.

In this podcast, we'll be talking about the key themes and learning from the reports and what this means for professionals working with children. Welcome, Annie and Jenny. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

So to get us started, could you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about the Panel and its roles and responsibilities?

Jenny Coles:
Hello, I'm Jenny Coles. I'm a member of the Child Practice Review Panel, I've been on the Panel since 2022, and my background is local authority children's services.

Annie Hudson:
Hello, I'm Annie Hudson and I'm chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. My background is also in children's services like Jenny. I started life as a social worker and then ultimately, like Jenny, was a director of Children's Services.

The Panel was established through the Children and Social Work Act in 2017, and had its first meeting, I think, in 2018. Essentially, it was part of the new architecture around multi-agency working in England to protect and safeguard children and it has three core roles, really.

Firstly, it provides oversight of the system of local reviews that take place at a local level by local safeguarding partners in response to serious incidents where children have been harmed or indeed died as a result of abuse and neglect. So that means we see all the rapid reviews and all the local safeguarding practice reviews that are undertaken by local safeguarding partners.

Secondly, we provide a system learning role, which, by looking at all of those reviews — and through some of the thematic reviews, including the one that we're going to be talking about, about child sexual abuse in the family environment — looks at some of the patterns in practice that have emerged from those reviews, with a view of identifying where improvements may need to be made, either at a local, regional or national level, and also where there may need to be changes in policy to better support high quality child protection and safeguarding work.

And then thirdly, the Panel has a system leadership role working with many others, including safeguarding partners and national organisations — including the NSPCC — to work together to identify what's working well in the system of safeguarding children and also where there needs to be improvement.

So in a sense, we're a... I mean, we provide a bit of a weather vane through the lens — and it is a very specific lens — of where things have gone wrong for children about how well the system that we have in place is working for children and their families.

Host:
Thank you. And you mentioned there that you work with the local safeguarding partnerships in England. Could you expand a little bit more about how you do that?

Annie:
We do that in a number of ways. So first and foremost, we receive and comment, provide them with feedback, on all of the rapid reviews and all of the LCSPRs that they undertake every year. So in the 2023-24 year, it was about 340 serious incidents which generated reviews.

And we look at those reviews and then we provide feedback on those reviews to both assist their local learning, but also to assist in their improvements in practice. We use those reviews to undertake thematic reviews. We did the one on sexual abuse. We will be producing, very shortly, a thematic analysis about, firstly, race and racial bias and racism in child protection, and also one on neglect.

So we pick topics or themes and use that local material from safeguarding partners. And in all stages we look to involve... not always all safeguarding partners, but, you know, selected safeguarding partners to really help build up national knowledge and intelligence about safeguarding practice.

Host:
So with all of this learning that you're gathering, how does the Panel share that more widely with the local and the national reviews? How do you share that and what are some of those common themes?

Annie:
We do that through reports, but we also do that through newsletters, we do that through webinars. So for example, again with the sexual abuse national review, we had two really well-attended webinars — I think they both had more than 200 people coming along for each one — as a way of not just disseminating the evidence from those reviews, but also to engage people in discussion, active discussion about some of the issues which are often very complex in nature, and therefore there aren't simple solutions to resolving some of those problems. But Jenny, perhaps you want to add to that?

Jenny:
Yeah. And I think we're learning in terms of how we're doing webinars and the latest ones on our latest review of child sexual abuse in the family, as Annie said, had a lot of participants. It was only an hour, but we got a lot of information over in discussion and we welcomed the feedback because then that adds to our learning. But we also are linked into regions — each Panel member has a region — and we do attend regional conferences, talk about the Panel, but also listen to what people are doing on the ground and what they're learning, and what they think would be a broader set of learning, whether it's at their regional level or the national level as well.

Annie:
And one other thing to add is that— one of the things we're doing at the moment is that we have commissioned from an independent organisation an evaluation of the impact of the Panel's work. We are also in a continuous learning cycle and we want to get that feedback in evidence about which of the things we do have most or least impact, because we need to go on changing our practice and the ways in which we engage with the 140-150 safeguarding partners around the country.

Host:
Yeah. And how are the local safeguarding partnerships— what are they doing locally themselves? What are they gathering and taking from the national Panel and what are they getting and gathering from elsewhere? And that will be a really interesting piece of work to see what people are saying about that.

Annie:
Yeah. And I think some of the themes that we've identified and we've majored on, either in annual reports or in national reviews, have come absolutely from the evidence and the conversations with safeguarding partners. For example, in the annual report this year, one of the three spotlighted themes was around mental health and mental health of children and young people.

And that has been a very, very consistent theme, hasn't it Jenny, from many reviews, where children, for example, have taken their own lives or where they've been involved either in harm in their own home environment or externally.

And a lot of the messaging back from safeguarding partners has been about the adequacy or otherwise of mental health services, the links between mental health services and children's services and so on. So, we try and pick up and then get some more indepth evidence around themes that also local areas are highlighting.

Jenny:
And I think to add to that, in the annual review: looking at the mental health of parents and how agencies who predominantly might work with adults, how it's really important they see that individual as a parent as well and take a holistic and family approach. This has been a fairly constant theme in reviews where mental health in parents has been present.

Host:
And I know we're going to talk about the annual report a little bit later on, but the other big report we published last year was your national review into child sexual abuse within the family environment. This report explores what is needed to enable practitioners to identify and respond to concerns of child sexual abuse, putting the needs of children first.

How did you decide within that review what areas to focus on?

Jenny:
Well, first of all, we decided to do the review because that had been a theme which has grown in evidence over the last 18 months to two years. And at the point where we did it, we had a really rich evidence body. In fact, we looked at the experience of 193 children with the Centre of expertise [on child sexual abuse] doing that fieldwork and writing that report. We felt that perhaps what had happened over the years, with absolutely the right focus on child sexual exploitation outside of the family and criminal exploitation, but that had perhaps been done at the expense of not progressing practice and supporting and safeguarding children who'd been sexually abused within their families.

And we tested that out with safeguarding partners and they said, yeah, that's an area that increasingly they were finding challenging. So, for those reasons, we decided to make this a national review.

Host:
And I know when you published the review, you called it 'I wanted them to notice'. Why did you call it that?

Jenny Coles:
So we interviewed two young people for this review, and "I wanted them to notice" was a quote from one of those young people, and we thought it really powerfully summed up what the review was about. The key finding of the review was that practitioners found great difficulty in talking directly with children around child sexual abuse. And often the feedback was that when they were in the child protection system and maybe on a child protection plan, the whole focus on evidence and verbal disclosure meant that they were often put on a plan for a broader category, like neglect.

So that was a key finding of the review and, in fact, linked in to the national and local recommendations for safeguarding partnerships about training for practitioners across the system, in terms of talking to children, having the confidence and the skills to do that.

Host:
Yeah, it is difficult. Practitioners working with children feel that they're not allowed to ask somehow, don't they? And yet what we're hearing from the young people is they do want to be asked.

Jenny:
Absolutely. And again, another key and helpful finding of the review was looking at the interface of the child protection system and the criminal justice system. And what appears to have happened over really probably, Annie, we'd say the last 20 years or more, that the criminal justice system and the focus on evidence for that has actually prevented practice developing. That's a quite a strong phrase, but it was very clear what came out of this review, and that actually the child protection system, the safeguarding system, operates on the balance of probabilities and not the threshold for criminal evidence. What we're saying here is we need a step change in how children are supported and families are supported where child sexual abuse has happened within the family.

Host:
One of the things I noticed when I read the report is that when cases were referred to the police and they decided that they were going to take no further action, then social workers or other practitioners working with the families believed that that meant that the sexual abuse hadn't happened because the police hadn't taken action.

Jenny:
And the feedback we had that people felt they couldn't take this any further; that they were worried about talking directly to children in case that prevented further investigations, when in fact the police, when they stop an investigation, if they don't feel there's enough evidence, it's for now. It doesn't mean to say that can't be reopened, and it doesn't mean to say that professionals shouldn't carry on working and supporting families and talking about the abuse to ensure that children's needs are met.

Annie:
One other facet of the review, which I think is really powerful and evidences that point that Jenny's just made, is that we still operate as a system in a very fragmented, siloed way. That was the finding, which I think many of us were quite shocked by, which was that of those 193 children that Jenny just described, in a third of the cases, the instances, family members were known to have sexually abused a child in the past, or to present a risk either because they've been convicted or they've been the subject of an allegation previously.

When you unravel that, what it highlighted was how information about people who could pose a risk — and these were predominantly men — possibly historically, possibly in another part of the country with another family, that information was not made available to the children's services, people who are working with children in the contemporaneous context.

So there's something about how we share information about people who can pose a severe risk to children, but also how we need to be thinking outside the box sometimes about the risks. So, for example, somebody who may have been the focus of a police inquiry about indecent images of children. There was sometimes an assumption that that meant that they would not pose a risk to their own children, which in many instances, some instances, absolutely not; was a very incorrect assumption.

So we really do need to bring all the agencies together who have expertise in this area, including criminal justice agencies, including probation, working together so that they get that joined up picture of risk of harm to children, that's not just about the current situation, but maybe about the historical information about key family members.

Jenny:
And although we've made national recommendations, we're really clear that safeguarding partnerships can get on and we hope that the recommendations we've made are helpful and the report's helpful for them to have an action plan — for a better word — about what to do next and improve their practice. And, you know, this is all based on the evidence that safeguarding partners have put into their local practice reviews. So it is based on real practice that's happening currently.

We hope this is helpful. We've had a lot of people on the webinars. It is an area that people have wanted us to concentrate on. So we look forward to seeing how practice has developed and we're just thinking about how we can support that, but also monitor it to make sure that with all the hard work and the responses of many practitioners and children and young people, that they can see an improvement in how children are supported.

Host:
You talked a little bit - well, you mentioned the recommendations for government and recommendations for safeguarding partners as well. Would you like to expand on that a little bit?

Jenny:
I mean, in terms of national recommendations, we're asking that there should be a national strategic plan around child sexual abuse — there is a child sexual abuse strategy, but that's quite dated now probably — and that that plan takes in some of these key findings we're talking about.

Nationally, working with professional bodies, we see a change in how practitioners are trained and get the necessary skills and guidance and a multi-agency training, but from the beginning of their professional careers, and not seeing this as a specialism; because the feedback from families, and from the experts by experience that were consulted as part of this review, is early intervention here can make such a difference in terms of lessening future vulnerability.

We also had some national recommendations for the family court justice system and Cafcass to consider what's in this report. They were met as stakeholders, in terms of formulating these recommendations, and we really hope that that will be taken on board, particularly within the court arena, and we hope this will be helpful. And particularly regarding the really important thing around health support and meeting health needs of children that have been sexually abused.

So there's very clear pathways and that commissioners are clear that services they commission within the NHS and providers can meet, and people are skilled to meet, the needs of children.

Host:
So that was a huge piece of work doing that report into child sexual abuse within the family environment and you've talked about all the different ways that you've engaged there with stakeholders and are feeding back stuff out. I wonder if we can move on now to the annual report, which was published in December 2024. So that looks at safeguarding incidents across and over the last year.

What are those key themes that were coming through last year?

Annie:
Yes, this was looking at about 330 serious incidents, which actually generated more than that number of reviews. One of the first things to note is that that represented and reflected a reduction of about 18% on the number of serious incidents notified to the previous year. We don't quite understand what that's about, and further work is being undertaken to interrogate that, because we need to understand whether that's because things are not being notified when they need to be, or whether it's actually that there has been a diminuation in certain types of abuse and harm for children.

Just in terms of top lines, I suppose the first thing to be aware of is that babies under one remain the most vulnerable group for all sorts of understandable and to be expected reasons. The other age, which is, if you like, most dangerous in terms of prevalence and propensity is 16- to 17-year-olds. Those children, it is much more in terms of extrafamilial harm. With babies, obviously it's much more likely to be particular physical abuse or neglect within the family.

There is a continuation of some of the patterns we've seen in the past in terms of children, for example, who are out of education. That is partly children who are in elective home education and also children who are not on a school roll or are not in mainstream education and missing a lot of education, and that's been a major issue of concern.

Earlier last year, we published a thematic analysis of children who had been seriously harmed or died and who were electively home educated — not necessarily as a result, because most children in EHE, of course, thrive and are very happy and are safe. But there is a small group of children who don't have that oversight of agencies in terms of their wellbeing and safety. So that education dimension is really important and just reinforces the importance of children being in school because of all the benefits of school, but also because it does mean if they are vulnerable and at risk, schools will have a much more daily ability to take the temperature on how well those children are and how safe they are.

We also look at things like whether children are known to services, whether they're on a child in need plan. Quite a number, something like just over 40% of children who are the focus of those serious incidents, were known to have been a child in need, either at the time of the incident or previously. And again, that's not that surprising because these are the most vulnerable children. So you would expect that they may well have had contact with children's services, children's social care. A relatively small number were children looked after and they had suffered harm or abuse either in placements — foster placements — or were in residential placements and then harmed outside the home.

So what you get through the annual report, I suppose, is a picture of the complexity of needs, the complexity of age, and other demographics. Something like 75% of the children were from White backgrounds. There's an under-representation compared to the population of children from Asian backgrounds, and conversely, an over-representation of children from Black backgrounds, and it's partly that that has been the driver behind a piece of work we're doing at the moment, and which we will publish shortly, about race, racial bias, racism and ethnicity in rapid reviews and LCSPRs. Because we need to understand better what is going on there in terms of under- and over-representation. But most importantly, how does practice need to change and be more responsive to the needs of those children? So that's the picture of the children.

Then what we've done this year is to build on previous analysis of some of the big practice themes that we've seen over the years around, you know, focusing on the voice and experience of children, about bringing critical analysis to assessment and so on, and looked at three particular themes: parental mental health, children's mental health, and children who have been harmed in the extrafamilial environment, and done a bit of a deep dive around that. And there are some common themes which perhaps we can talk through about what we saw in relation to those issues.

Jenny:
A key theme throughout, as you'd probably expect, is multi-agency working. We always say, there should be better multi-agency working, people work in silos; but it is really complex. And we thought these three areas illustrated that and we understand that. But what our evidence shows from these reviews that in fact agencies, even though they come together in the child protection system through core groups or various professional planning groups, they're still going away and doing their actions for their own agency in a silo rather than working together. So really, it's a completely multi-agency approach.

And, you know, it's very clear that the complexity of the challenges that families and children and young people face require even closer collaboration than probably they did ten years ago, and a flexibility to operate and consider that range of information and how other professionals or practitioners working with the family or having contact with the family are responding. And the system that assists them — so the different panels, the various risk panels, particularly for those young people at risk of extra familial harm — even though they're multi-agency, the range of arenas that they're looked at and they're considered in don't always work together.

So what you get at the end of the day, rather than a real focus, perhaps, on what is going to make the difference for this child or family, is watered down by the complexity of the system that's trying to deliver the support, if you get what I mean. That was clear on the way through.

And I think, you know, in terms of the learning — and we do get feedback from safeguarding partners about what they've done in between, because it takes some time to publish a review, particularly if there might be a criminal investigation or a court trial. It shows that people are trying to streamline what they do and they are — particularly around the extrafamilial harms — setting up multi-agency hubs, bringing professionals together. And that is learning from what's happened out of some of these serious incidents and reviews.

Host:
That must be really rewarding for the Panel: having a review taking place and then seeing what is being put into place following that. Do you get a lot of that kind of feedback?

Jenny:
Well we're encouraging partnerships to do it. And in our feedback letters we say it would have been really helpful— you know, you've made a comment that the actions we can put in place, but it would be really helpful just to know how they're going, because that all adds to our database.

Host:
Okay. Shall we pause there for now, and then we can come back in the second half for the podcast and we can look in more detail at how to translate the learning from the reports into improvements for safeguarding practice.

Outro:
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.

Intro:
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.

Host:
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?

Annie Hudson:
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.

Jenny Coles:
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.

Annie:
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?

Jenny:
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.

Annie:
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.

Host:
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?

Jenny:
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.

Host:
Great. So that's something to look for in the report that will be published soon.

Jenny:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Host:
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?

Annie:
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.

Jenny:
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.

Annie:
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.

Jenny:
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.

Host:
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.

Annie:
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.

Host:
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.

Annie:
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.

Jenny:
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.

Annie:
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?

Jenny:
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.

Host:
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.

Jenny:
Thank you.

Annie:
Thank you.

Outro:
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.