Under Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023 , independent scrutiny aims to drive continuous improvement and provide assurance that safeguarding arrangements are effective for children, families and practitioners.
Under Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 specific types of organisations and individuals are required to evaluate their compliance with safeguarding and child protection practice and procedures and their overall practice in this regard.
In Lancashire this is undertaken annually using an audit tool completed by the agency which is scrutinised by the Performance Assurance and Impact subgroup and action plans developed to improve compliance.
The sharing of practice and systems provides an opportunity for agencies to learn from each other. Through feedback from partners on how systems and process impact on joint working agencies develop insight into where practice can be enhanced or changed.
In Lancashire, the partnership aims to undertake 3 piece of scrutiny work per reporting period. The theme of scrutiny are decided by the Performance, Assurance and Impact subgroup, taking into account themes from case reviews. Different tools are used within this process including:
- Agency self-evaluations
- Multi-agency case file audit
- Feedback from service users and practitioners
- Reviews of other inspections or audit work.
This information is collated and triangulated and used to form a report which outlines key findings, recommendations and form an action plan to enhance or change future practice.
The Performance, Assurance and Impact subgroup gains assurance that recommendations from learning from reviews are embedded in the partnership and are having an impact on practice.
After a Review has been concluded, an action planning meeting will take place, where agencies propose actions that they will take forward in their single agencies and decide if there are any actions that need to be taken forward from a partnership perspective.
The Performance Assurance and Impact subgroup track the actions, ensuring that progress is being made on them and getting progress updates from agency representatives at PAI meetings.
Twelve months after a Rapid Review or a CSPR has been completed, the PAI subgroup will request the responsible officers of the actions from the review to update the action plans with the evidence that actions have been completed and the impact of those actions on practice for the PAI subgroup to review.
The LSBU will produce a quarterly review theme report which will outline the number of actions from reviews, broken down by agency and theme. The PAI subgroup will analyse the findings of the report and decide the best way to gain assurance on overall review actions. This could be through dip sampling single agency action plans, carrying out new audit work or amalgamating assurance regarding these themes into planned audit work.