Partnership Arrangements

Working Together 2023 outlines that effective partnership working with parents and carers happens when practitioners build strong, trusting and cooperative relationships and empowers families to participate in service design and values their contributions and feedback.

One of the North East Integrated Care Board goals is ‘Giving our children and young people the best start in life’ which includes a commitment to listening to people’s lived experiences of using health and care services.

Children’s Social Care places a strong emphasis on engaging and collaborating with parents and carers to build a supportive and inclusive environment for children. This engagement is achieved through various structured activities, such as biannual practice weeks and monthly practice audits and observations, where feedback is gathered directly from parents and carers. These mechanisms allow parents and carers to share their experiences, insights, and suggestions, which are then utilized to enhance the quality of services provided. By actively listening to the voices of families, our service better understands their needs and can tailor approaches, accordingly, ensuring that the support offered is both effective and empathetic.

To further support this collaborative approach, we have fully embedded multi-agency relational practice training, and bespoke masterclasses open to all practitioners. These training programs equip staff with the skills necessary to work ‘with’ families, rather than doing ‘for’ or ‘to’. Practitioners are encouraged to consider the social discipline window in their interactions and approaches, which helps in striking the right balance between high support and high challenge. This framework ensures that all voices—especially those of children and their families—are heard and valued. By fostering a culture of mutual respect and understanding, our service aims to create partnerships that lead to better outcomes for all involved.

In Newcastle there is a strong focus on how we work with children and their families using relational and restorative practice, under the banner of ‘Family Valued’.  This is a whole system, whole city approach promoting relational working, building and maintaining meaningful and respectful relationships, as opposed to focussing solely on policy and process.

This recognises that successful outcomes for children depend on strong partnership working between parents/carers and the practitioners working with them. Our practitioners take a child-centred approach to meeting the needs of the whole family.

• We develop policies procedures by proactively identifying and responding to new and emerging safeguarding issues
• We communicate to practitioners across organisations and services the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, raising awareness of how this can best be done and encouraging all to do so
• We monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our arrangements and what we do as safeguarding partners and relevant agencies and look for ways to improve
• We coordinate responses to serious incidents and unexpected child deaths
• We collect and analyse national and local information about safeguarding practice reviews and advise on lessons learnt
• We reflect and make recommendations in the planning and development of services for children in Newcastle

Each LSP appoints a Delegated Safeguarding Partner, (DSP,) for its agency. DSPs should be of sufficient seniority to be able to speak with authority, take decisions on behalf of the LSP and hold their sectors to account. The DSPs should have the authority to carry out these functions, while ultimate accountability remains with the LSP as the individual responsible for the delivery of the statutory duties of the safeguarding partners.

Strong, joined-up leadership and clear accountability is critical to effective multiagency safeguarding and the LSPs and DSPs in Newcastle are committed to arrangements that focus on continuous learning and improvement with a clear line of sight on frontline safeguarding practice. All leaders will promote a shared commitment to work together to improve outcomes for children and their families.

In Newcastle the Delegated Safeguarding Partners (DSPs) are the:

• Director of Children and Families, Newcastle City Council
• Chief Superintendent Newcastle Area Commander, Northumbria Police
• Director of Nursing (North), Northeast and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB)

Working Together 2023 outlines the joint functions of the DSP to include:

• Delivery and monitoring of multi-agency priorities and procedures to protect and safeguard children in local area.
• Close partnership working and engagement with education (strategic/operation) and other relevant agencies.
• The implementation of effective information sharing arrangements, including data sharing and joint analysis
• Delivery of high quality and timely rapid reviews and LSCPRs, with impact from local and national reviews and scrutiny clearly evidenced in annual reports.
• Provision of multi-agency safeguarding training and development
• Seeking of and responding to children and families about experiences of services and co-designing with different communities and groups

As outlined in the arrangements, the LSPs and DSPs have regular interaction and communication to ensure that the LSPs have sufficient oversight and detail on key topics and issues to maintain their statutory responsibilities.  The arrangements ensure that the DSPs have the oversight of quality and compliance of the delivery of agreed shared priorities and to seek assurance that multi-agency practice is reviewed and operating well.  Where this is not evident, the DSPs will utilise capacity and resource from their own agencies to engage, respond and improve operational systems and practice.

The DSPs jointly develop and implement the partnership business plan, identify and agree partnership strategic priorities and utilise the independent scrutiny role to support develop and strengthen the partnership arrangements. The DSPs identify specific areas for scrutiny and assurance activity relating to either strategic or operational partnership working to provide insight into current practice and potential areas for improvement. This reporting will provide assurance evidence and focus for identifying the future strategic objectives that will lead to operational improvements.

In order to support delivery of these functions, the statutory safeguarding partner LSPs appoint one of the three DSPs as the Partnership Chair and to support the Partnership Chair there is regular communication between the Partnership Chair, the Independent Scrutineer and Business Manager.

The role of Partnership Chair will be rotated on a two-year cycle between the three statutory safeguarding partners (Northumbria Police, Northeast and North Cumbria ICB, Newcastle City Council).  The Director of Children and Families for Newcastle City Council will undertake this first period in role at the commencement of the new arrangements (January 2025). The Deputy Chair for the first period will be the Chief Superintendent, Area Commander for Newcastle, Northumbria Police.

Working Together 2023 identifies the functions of the Partnership Chair role as:

• To develop strategic links, support and hold to account all LSPs in fulfilling their safeguarding duties for children.
• Ensure that local arrangements are designed to work collaboratively and effectively by encouraging and supporting the development of partnership working between the LSPs, DSPs, independent scrutiny role and NSCP sub-groups.
• Chair the meetings of the DSPs, including any additional meetings convened as a response to specific and exceptional circumstances, with the help of the business manager and independent scrutiny role.
• Offer appropriate challenge to ensure that the partners are accountable, and that the local arrangements operate effectively.

The Partnership is required to have an independent scrutineer function that is separate and distinct from the functions of the Partnership Chair to provide assurance and challenge to the statutory safeguarding partners through a range of scrutiny methods.

In Newcastle an independent scrutineer has been appointed to provide safeguarding partners and relevant agencies with rigorous, effective support and challenge at both strategic and operational level. The role supports the partnership drive for continuous improvement and assurance that arrangements work effectively for children, families and practitioners and adds value to the work of the partnership. This role contributes to a wider system of assurance and accountability including:

• Assurance and accountability action undertaken at the request of the three statutory safeguarding partners
• Wider partnership activity (such as quality assurance, performance management and learning frameworks)
• Independent inspectorate inspections

Independent scrutiny is a key partnership activity, providing objective and rigorous analysis of local arrangements. Scrutiny will be evidenced based and will consider the impact both the Lead and Delegated Safeguarding Partners (DSP’s) are making through their strategic oversight and leadership.  It will also focus on involvement of children and their families in shaping strategic decision making and practice together with feedback from practitioners.

The statutory safeguarding partners and relevant agencies must act in accordance with these arrangements and are expected to understand each other’s differences of views and resolve issues between relevant individuals and/or organisations.  However, there are occasions that issues may require the need to utilise the partnership dispute resolution process to escalate an issue to the LSPs.

In Newcastle the partnership resolution process is the Regional Safeguarding Procedures Escalation Policy – ‘Resolving Professional Differences and Escalation‘. Whistleblowing procedures provide an additional important route for staff to raise concerns in a safe process that protects their position.  Safeguarding Partners and the wider partnership should utilise their organisation whistleblowing procedures.

The purpose of a serious child safeguarding case review, at local and national level, is to identify improvements that can be made to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. The NSCP has a shared learning and improvement pathway with Gateshead Safeguarding Children Partnership.

Learning is relevant locally but has wider importance for all practitioners working with children and families and for the government and policymakers.  Understanding whether there are systemic issues, and whether and how policy and practice need to change, is critical to the system being dynamic and self-improving.

The North and South of Tyne Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP) is not part of the NSCP but is multi-agency and includes 6 Local Authorities of which Newcastle is one and the Northeast and North Cumbria ICB.

The death of a child is a devastating loss which profoundly affects all those involved.  Since April 2008, all deaths of children up to the age of 18 years, excluding stillbirths and planned terminations, are reviewed by a Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP).

The purpose of the panel is to:

• Ascertain why a child has died by a thorough but proportionate review of the facts and circumstances surrounding the death
• Determine the contributory and modifiable factors
• Make recommendations to all relevant organisations where actions have been identified which may prevent further deaths or promote the health, safety and wellbeing of children
• Provide detailed data to NCMD which is analysed nationally and regularly reports are produced, for example, on the impact of deprivation on child deaths
• Produce an annual report highlighting local trends and patterns and any actions taken by the panel
• Contribute to the wider learning locally, regionally and nationally

Whilst the CDOP work is undertaken on a wider regional footprint (that includes the Newcastle area), our NSCP arrangements include reporting mechanisms and information sharing between the CDOP Panel and our DSP and Subgroups. The CDOP Annual Report can be accessed here CDOP annual report 2023-24.

Working Together 2023 states, “the local authority should notify the Secretary of State for Education and Ofsted of the death of a care leaver up to and including the age of 24. This should be notified via the Child Safeguarding Online Notification System”.

Should any of our young care leavers sadly die, our NSCP and GSCP Learning and Improvement Reviewing Pathway is the agreed process to support the identification and relevant management of the deaths of these young people.

Information on the Child Death and Care Leaver review procedures is available from the Resource Library – Notification of the Death of a Care Leaver