The Devon SCP has adopted the one dedicated independent scrutineer model. Although there are plans to appoint a permanent independent scrutineer, the current person has been appointed on a monthly rolling basis and has been in place for the whole of this reporting period.
Given the close relationship between the Devon SCP and the multi-agency Devon Improvement Partnership Board, the partnership benefits from additional independent scrutiny through this Board’s appointed commissioner.
Within this reporting period, the partnership became the Devon Safeguarding Children’s Partnership. This change of name enabled the partnership to focus on key child safeguarding matters. At times, the partnership was overwhelmed by being perceived as the single entity in responding to all matters relating to children. To help this transition, the Executive commissioned the National Safeguarding Partner facilitator (LA Lead) carry out a ‘health check’ of the partnership. This valuable exercise allowed the delegated safeguarding partners a much clearer picture of the strengths of the partnership together with a clear understanding of priorities to improve the effectiveness of the partnership further.
In addition to multi agency case audits, there have been 2 independent scrutineer led reviews. The first one focused on the ‘front door’. This review highlighted the need for the delegated safeguarding partners to have a clearer ‘line of sight’ to the Front Door, demonstrating a systems leadership approach on the service offering to children & families who need timely assessment, support & intervention. This has improved through regular briefs provided to both the DSP’s and the partnership’s Business Group, allowing barriers to be discussed at an appropriate level. The review also recommended that another statutory partner chaired the Front Door strategic group to foster a multi-agency ethos. A senior police officer now chairs this meeting, which has led to the intended improvements. The Front Door Strategic Group is somewhat limited in identifying emerging issues and trends from the absence of a dashboard. Although work is ongoing in this respect, it is taking time to progress to a stage where leaders can have a clear understanding of the operational effectiveness of its front door.
The second independent scrutineer led review looked into the partnership’s response to how it learns from serious incidents. Although this review identified that there is a clear and robust process in the identification and reporting of serious incidents, there were significant areas of improvement required around rapid reviews and Local CSPRs (LCSPRs). The delegated safeguarding partners have tasked the partnership Business Group to progress key actions to ensure that learning from serious incidents is embedded effectively into the partnership.
The partnership benefits from a strong and proactive Quality Assurance Workforce Delivery Group, chaired jointly by Children Social Care’s Head of Academy, Quality Assurance and Practice and the Head of Public Health Nursing. The detailed quality assurance work around Physical Harm to Infants 0-2 is a good example of the level of detail practitioners examined to understand the enablers and challenges to improving practice.
There are strong links between the Devon SCP and other strategic Devon partnerships such as its Safer Devon Partnership. These close links allow for sound matrix management of issues such as the Serious Violence Duty.
The Devon SCP benefits from experience and skill amongst its leaders and practitioners that will enable it to be adaptive to demands and tackle some of the major obstacles to progress that it is facing. However, its capability to do so is currently impaired by not having the benefit of a data dashboard which impacts upon the executive’s ability to challenge and cause enquiry to be made. The absence of a partnership dashboard has been identified as a critical issue not only in the review of the Front Door, but the aforementioned Health Check.
Impact of Independent Scrutiny Arrangements – before September 2022, the Partnership had been without an independent scrutineer for six years. The introduction of this role has brought a focus on areas needing improvement, such as tracking actions and implementing recommendations from rapid reviews and LCSPRs.
Impact of learning from Independent Scrutiny Arrangements – the learning from being independently scrutinised over the past 12 months includes ensuring that our Quality Assurance framework meets the requirements of all Partners, addressing the lack of learning from serious incidents, and recognising the need for more oversight by our delegated safeguarding partners regarding activities in the Children’s Front Door and the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH). This scrutiny has prompted several reviews of the MASH, resulting in revised ways of working within the MASH and the establishment of the Partnerships Priority 2.
Is there anything wrong with this page?
Help us improve
Don’t include personal information.
"*" indicates required fields