SSCB Constitution - Revised November 2016 V15 Web Site Version

STAFFORDSHIRE SAFEGUARDING CHILDREN BOARD

(SSCB)

CONSTITUTION

Partnership Relationships, Roles and Responsibilities

Version Control: Version 14 (revised November 2016)

1

‘Safeguarding children is everybody’s responsibility’

SSCB CHAIR INTRODUCTION TO THE SSCB CONSTITUTION

Dear Colleague,

This Constitution formalises the governance arrangements for Staffordshire Safeguarding Children Board (SSCB), and confirms the responsibilities and accountabilities agreed by the constituent partner agencies.

The document has been designed to assist you in understanding the contributions that are vital to the work of the SSCB, including the themed subgroups, so that we can collectively achieve our overall purpose of securing effective inter-agency arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people living in Staffordshire.

Experience tells us that our collaborative working is most effective when we are clear as to our responsibilities and work to coherent plans underpinned with proactive and proportionate information sharing. Accordingly, I urge and encourage you to ensure that these governance arrangements are appropriately embedded in your agency and communicated to and understood by your staff.

To ensure that this Constitution is kept up to date it will be reviewed as part of the annual reporting and business planning cycle to reflect any local strategic partnership developments and new structural arrangements.

May I conclude by taking this opportunity to thank you for the valuable work that you do in support of the Board.

John Wood

Independent Chair

Staffordshire Safeguarding Children Board

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to set out how the Staffordshire Safeguarding Children Board (SSCB) operates, how decisions are made, and to detail what inter-agency arrangements are in place to help ensure that individual agencies effectively safeguard and promote the welfare of children[1]and young people in Staffordshire. This SSCB Constitution will also detail the arrangements by which Board partners will undertake their roles and responsibilities, as identified within legislation and guidance.

Legislative Framework

The Children Act 2004 requires each local authority to establish a Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) made up of representatives from the agencies and bodies which have regular contact with children, or have responsibility for services to them in the local area. The statutory agencies which are required to cooperate in the establishment and operation of the LSCB are set out in section 13(3) of the Children Act 2004. Sections 13 to 16 of the Children Act 2004 set out the statutory framework for the LSCB.

The SSCB is therefore established under Section 13 of the Children Act 2004 by Staffordshire County Council as the children’s services authority for this area. Detailed guidance issued under section 7 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970, is contained within Working Together to Safeguard Children 2015. Staffordshire Safeguarding Children Board (hereafter referred to as the SSCB or the Board) became operational on 1st April 2006.

For the purpose of this document, safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is defined as:

• Protecting children from maltreatment
• Preventing the impairment of health or development;
• Ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care; and
• Undertaking that role to help enable those children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully.

Child protection is the activity that is undertaken to protect specific children who are suffering, or are likely to suffer significant harm (Working Together, 2015).

Purpose

SSCB is the key statutory mechanism that brings together representatives of each of the main agencies and professionals responsible for promoting the welfare and safety of children and young people. It is an inter-agency forum for agreeing how the different services and professional groups should co-operate to safeguard children throughout Staffordshire (except Stoke-on-Trent, which has its own Local Safeguarding Children Board) and, for making sure that arrangements work effectively to promote better outcomes for children.

Strategic Relationships

The SSCB will be a formal consultee on the development and any review of the Staffordshire Family Strategic Partnership Strategy whichrelates to the provision and commissioning of services for children and their families. The SSCB Business Plan will be informed by the strategic objectives of this strategyas well as other national and locally agreed SSCB safeguarding children priorities.

The Independent Chair of the SSCB will be a member of Staffordshire’s Family Strategic Partnership (FSP). The Chair will report on the SSCB’s achievements to the FSP and will challenge the FSP on how it is fulfilling its safeguarding children responsibilities on behalf of the SSCB.The Chair will also attend and report to the Staffordshire Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB) as and when required.

There is a requirement for the SSCB to publish an annual report on the effectiveness of local safeguarding children arrangements. This report is published on the SSCB website and is submitted to the Chief Executive and Leader of the Council, to the local Office of Police and Crime Commissioner and the Chair of the Staffordshire HWB.A copy of the SSCB Annual Report will also be shared with the members of Staffordshire County Council’s Safeguarding Scrutiny Panel.

The SSCB Chair will therefore present the SSCB Annual Report to the FSPand Staffordshire HWB on behalf of the SSCB partnership. The Chair of the FSP will also present an annual report to the SSCB outlining overall progress made against their strategic objectives.

A protocol has been developed between Staffordshire FSP; Staffordshire’s HWB; and the SSCBto help to develop local synergy, clarity of roles and responsibilities and effective communication between all three strategic partnership forums in respect of promoting the welfare and safety of children.

Governance

The SSCB has a clear strategic responsibility to undertake a scrutiny, quality assurance and challenge role in respect of how agencies individually and collectively promote the welfare and safety of children living in Staffordshire.

The Chief Executive of Staffordshire County Council (SCC) is responsible for holding the SSCB Independent Chair to account for the effective working of the SSCB. The Cabinet Member for Children and Young People is politically accountable for Staffordshire’s Children’s Social Care Services. The SSCB Independent Chair works closely with Staffordshire County Council’s Director of Children’s Services (who also holds the title of Director for Families and Communities) , who has the statutory responsibility for improving outcomes for children and for delivering high quality children’s social care functions. Ofsted independently inspects the effectiveness of the SSCB as part of the inspection of local authority functions.

The SSCB Business Plan will be agreed by the Board and made available to all relevant partner members on an annual basis. The role of partner members is to hold their organisation and its offices to account for their contribution to the effective functioning of the SSCB.

The Structure of the SSCB

The main Board will be supported by an Executive Group,seven subgroups, a task group relating to the review of restraint, a joint LSCB multi-agency forum in respect of child sexual abuse (the Child Sexual Abuse Forum) and additional task tofinish groups as required. The SSCB Structure Chart in Appendix 1, (page 23) demonstrates the structure of the Board and also the roles and relationships of the Board within the wider local safeguarding partnership system.

The SSCB Manager is strategically responsible to the SSCB Independent Chair and is supported by a senior manager within Staffordshire County Council. The SSCB Manager is responsible for providing day to day business support, for implementing the business plan and for the coordination, monitoring and evaluation work.The SSCB Development Officer and Training Manager support the SSCB Manager to undertake this work. SSCB Administrators provide administrative and organisational support for the Board and the SSCB Manager.

Principles

The following principles will underpin the work of the SSCB.The Board will:

• Keep the safeguarding and welfare needs of children at the centre of everything is does;
• Maintain its independence from all agencies and structures (including the FSP, HWB and Staffordshire County Council) to promote an equal partnership;
• Operate a challenge and assurance function to both partner members and external organisations;
• Involve children, families, carers and frontline practitioners and managers in its work;
• Develop strong working relationships with strategic partners to promote clear roles, responsibilities and governance arrangements;
• Be open and transparent in the work that it undertakes;
• Be a learning and development Board that seeks continuous improvement.

Objectives of the SSCB

The role of SSCB is to primarily safeguard and promote the welfare of children.The core objectives of the SSCB are set out in Section 14(1) of the Children Act 2004 and are defined as:

• To coordinate what is done by each person or body represented on the Board for the purpose of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children within Staffordshire;and
• To ensure the effectiveness of what is done by each such person or body for that purpose.

The Scope of SSCB

SSCB safeguards and promotes the welfare of children across three broad areas of activity which should all take into account the need to promote equality of opportunity and to meet the diverse needs of all children in living in our communities. Specifically:

1. To identify and prevent harm and impairment of health or development and ensure that all children

are provided with safe and effective care as they are growing up. This would include ensuring the

SSCB;

• Has mechanisms in place to identify abuse and neglect wherever they may occur;

• Works to increase the understanding of safeguarding children issues in the professional and wider community, promoting the message that ‘safeguarding [children] is everybody’s responsibility’’ (Working Together to Safeguard Children 2015);

• Helps to ensure that organisations working or in contact with children operate safe recruitment and safe workforce practices that take into account the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children;

• Monitors the effectiveness of organisations’ implementation of their duties under section 11 of the Children Act 2004;

• Helps to ensure that children know who they can contact when they have concerns about their own or others’ safety and welfare; and

• Helps to ensure that adults (including those who are harming children) know who they can contact if they have a concern about a child or young person.

• Supports the development of effective local strategies in respect of key national safeguarding children agendas.

2. To be proactive and undertake targeted work:

• To safeguard and promote the welfare of groups of particular groups of children who are potentially more vulnerable than the general population, for example: children living away from home, children who have run away from home, children in the youth justice system including custody, young carers, disabled children and children and young people affected by gangs;
• Through the development and evaluation of thresholds and procedures for work with children and families where a child has been identified as being ‘in need’ under the Children Act 1989, but where the child is not suffering or at risk of suffering significant harm.

3. To be responsive and undertake work to protect children who are suffering or likely to suffer significant harm (section 47, Children Act 1989), including:

• Children abused and neglected within families, including those harmed, in the context of domestic abuse; as a consequence of the impact of substance misuse or parental mental ill health;

• Children abused outside of families by adults known to them; including those in fear of or subject to forced marriage and honour based violence;

• Children abused and neglected by professional carers, within an institutional setting, or anywhere else where children are cared for away from home;

• Children abuse by strangers;

• Children abused by other young people;

• Young perpetrators of abuse

• Children abused through sexual exploitation and child trafficking, and;

• Young victims of crime.

SSCB Functions

The core functions of the Board are set out in the Local Safeguarding Children Board’s Regulations, 2006. Without prejudice to the generality of the objectives, the Board’s functions are to generate more effective arrangements throughout the whole partnership in relation to:

• Protecting children from maltreatment;

• Preventing impairment of children’s health or development;

• Ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care;

• Enabling children to have optimum life chances in entering adulthood successfully, particularly in terms of being healthy and staying safe;

• Ensuring that lessons are learned by sharing best child protection and safeguarding practice generally; and in particular, from episodes including when a child dies, or suffers serious harm when maltreatment is considered to have been a contributory factor; and

• Ensuring that work to protect children from harm is properly co-ordinated and effective is the primary function of the Board.

These functions will be performed by:

• Participating in the planning of services for children in the authority to help ensure that the safeguarding of children is a primary consideration. This will include contributing to Staffordshire’s Strategies for Children and Families and establishing effective strategic arrangements with the HWB and the FSP;

• Developing policies and procedures for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children including: establishing clear thresholds for access to services - from early intervention through to specialist services; as well aspromoting safe recruitment practices, supervision and the investigation of any allegations made against people working with children;
• Communicating and raising awareness of wider safeguarding issues with practitioners,children, families and carers and the wider community. This will include wherever possible, consulting with children and their families or carers to help ensure that their views are taken into account in the planning and delivery of services;
• Establishing a Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP) and collecting and analysing information about child deaths. This includes targeted preventative child safety campaigns;
• Developing procedures to help to ensure a coordinated response to unexpected child deaths;
• Monitoring the effectiveness of what is done to safeguard and promote the welfare of children through monitoring, evaluation and audit activity and offering advice with regards to making improvements. All relevant Board members must have effective arrangements in place to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in accordance with their duties under section 11 of the Children Act 2004 or section 175 or 157 of the Education Act 2002. These arrangements include organisations having in place and being able to evidence:
• An organisational statement of accountability
• Clear lines of accountability for the commissioning and provision of services designed to safeguard and promote the welfare of children
• Senior board level lead and commitment
• A designated professional lead or named professional for safeguarding
• Staff supervision, support and training
• Safer recruitment practices
• Clear policies in line with SSCB procedures Processes for sharing information with other professionals and the SSCB
• A culture of listening to children and using their views to shape both their individual support and organisational development;
• Compliance with Local Authority Designated Officer reporting requirements; and

• Undertaking Serious Case Reviews where a child has died or has been seriously harmed in circumstances where abuse or neglect is known or suspectedto learn from incidents and improve local safeguarding children arrangements or practice). This includes participation in multi-agency or single agency learning reviews or audit activity in accordance with the Joint LSCB Learning and Development Framework
• Delivering and quality assuring training;
• Helping to ensure the coordination and implementation of services for children who are privately fostered; and
• Helping to ensure that children within Staffordshire haveaccess to appropriate and understandable information when they have concerns about staying safe.

The effective implementation of the SSCB’s objectives will contribute to an overall outcome of children in Staffordshire being safer.