As 2024 is all but done, we thought we’d take a quick look back on some of the key achievements and milestones from the last 12 months.

Working Together 2023

Working Together 2023 (WT23) was published in December last year, and we have been working hard to implement the requirements of this guidance by 31 December, as stipulated by the Department of Education. We facilitated training and briefing sessions so that our multi-agency professionals were aware of changes in WT23 to ensure that everyone in Devon involved in safeguarding children is aware of their roles and responsibilities under this new guidance.

Safeguarding Arrangements
We reviewed and updated our multi-agency arrangements so that they aligned with the new WT23 requirements, including ensuring that our delegated safeguarding partners (local authority, health services, police and education) work together with our voluntary, charity and independent partners effectively to identify and respond to the needs of children. These arrangements are now required to be reviewed annually. We have also reviewed our Devon Local Area Assessment Protocol for Children in need of Help and Support as this has to be published alongside our safeguarding arrangements by the end of this month.

Quality Assurance and Audits
Our quality assurance processes have been reviewed in order that they can robustly monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our safeguarding practices. This includes undertaking audits and reviews to ensure compliance with WT23 and identifying gaps in learning and areas for improvement.

Multi-agency Working
We have strengthened our collaboration with various agencies to ensure we have a co-ordinated approach to safeguarding children across Devon and promote the welfare of children, young people and their families.

Our Delegated Safeguarding Partners (DSPs)

Our DSP Executives are a very important part of our partnership structure, and this year they have been very active in supporting us to implement WT23 as well as holding us to account for our statutory duties.

• Chair – Roy Linden, Policing Commander for South Devon, Devon & Cornwall Police
• Penny Smith, Chief Nursing Officer, Devon Integrated Care Board (ICB), NHS Devon
• Julian Wooster, Director of Children’s Services, Devon County Council, Children Services
• Helen Casson, Chief Executive Officer, Wave Multi-Agency Academy Trust

In November, Julian Wooster took over as Devon County Council’s Interim Director of Children’s and Young People’s Futures. This role was previously held by Stuart Collins, who left to take up an opportunity to work closer to his home and family in London, which he had been looking forward to for some time. Stuart has been appointed to Corporate Director of Children, Young People and Education at Croydon Council and took up his new post on 25 November 2024.

Policies and Procedures

We have, and continue to develop, review and update our policies and procedures including:

• Professional Curiosity and Consent Guidance
• Information Sharing Guidance
• Safe sleeping
• Safeguarding policy (template for schools/education and early years)
• Working with Neglect – Good Practice Guide
• MASH Manual and Operational Procedures
• Achieving Best Evidence

Child Sexual Abuse
We finalised our multi-agency CSA Strategy 2024-2027 and our Healthy Sexual Behaviour guidance.

Child Exploitation
We reviewed our Adolescent Safety Framework/Safer Me assessment forms and guidance, including how our Multi-Agency Child Exploitation (MACE) groups work.

Physical Injury to Infants under 2
We conducted a thematic review and disseminated the findings and recommendations to our multi-agency partners.

Neglect
In response to three serious incident notifications where children had been subject to serious and cumulative neglect over a number of years, our multi-agency neglect task and finish group has worked hard to review and refine our Neglect Strategy, Neglect Toolkit and resources to support practitioners to focus on early identification and intervention to support families and prevent neglect. A thematic review of neglect was conducted, and a report will be published in February. We have planned a year of training, learning and development to disseminate findings and good practice to practitioners across Devon. The recent NSPCC report on neglect ‘Too little, too late‘ has been influential to this group.

Early Help in Devon

Early Help in Devon is a proactive approach designed to support children, young people, and their families at the earliest opportunity to prevent issues from escalating. It is not a designated team but a way of working that involves everyone collaborating to support the needs of families. The aim iof Early Help is to build on people’s capacity to manage their own dilemmas and prevent further problems in the future.

Some changes to Early Help have been made, which went live on 1 September 2024. To practitioners, this won’t be a substantial change, particularly when working with families at Level 2. The Indicators of need are available on our website.

The Locality Delivery Team still provides support to our partnership services and organisations so that they can fulfil their associated responsibilities. This includes being a go to ‘expert’ in Early Help with a strong working knowledge of the Early Help Right for Children IT system. They will support developing and implementing the Family Hubs approach across Devon and work as part of an integrated Family Hub Team and Family Hub network partner. For more information about the Level 3 Family Intervention Team, LINKS new Level 3 specialist service, and the Family Group Conference (FCG) service is available.

Learning and Development

Our annual training programme provided 10,925 places for our practitioners, ensuring they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to identify and respond to safeguarding concerns effectively.

Child Exploitation Conference
This in-person event featured some informative presentations from organisations across the UK and Devon, and over 180 practitioners attended. Break-out room activities focused on developing locality action plans for dealing with and disrupting child exploitation.  This was our first in-person conference on this scale since before Covid.

Multi-agency best practice events
We also recently held two best practice events on Enhancing Multi-Agency Collaboration to Prevent Physical Harm to Infants aged 0-2, which saw over 100 multi-agency partners learn more about recommendations from the Devon Safeguarding Children Partnership’s thematic review.

SaFest 2024
This was the fifth year of our annual weeklong online conference, where the presenters all give their time for free to provide some excellent learning opportunities for practitioners across the South West. We had over 250 practitioners join us online every day and we are now planning SaFest 2025. If you would like to help us plan next year’s event, or would like to present, please get in touch.