16.1
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Introduction
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16.1.1 |
Individual agencies are responsible for ensuring that their staff, paid and unpaid (i.e. volunteers), are competent and confident in carrying out their responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting children's welfare. |
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16.1.2 |
Two key elements of effective safeguarding and promoting of children's welfare are that all staff:
- Have a clear understanding of their individual and their agency's roles and responsibilities and are competent to undertake these in an effective manner;
- Have a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the staff and agencies they need to work collaboratively with, and are competent to engage effectively with them.
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16.1.3 |
Agencies are responsible for ensuring that their staff are competent to work effectively with others both within their own agency and across agency boundaries. This will be best achieved by a combination of single agency and inter-agency training:
- Single-agency training which is training carried out by a particular agency for its own staff;
- Inter-agency training which is for employees of different agencies who either work together formally or come together for training or development.
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16.1.4 |
Training delivered on an inter-agency basis is a highly effective way of promoting a common and shared understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of different professionals and contributes to effective working relationships. |
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16.1.5 |
Skills for Health in collaboration with Skills for Care 2005, has developed a UK-wide competence and skills framework for the children's workforce in health, comprising 13 competencies - see Skills for Health website. Skills for Health is the UK-wide sector skills council for health that aims to train the workforce so patients will have quick access to people who have the right mix of skills to suit their needs. Skills for Health is empowered by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to influence education and training spend. |
16.2
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Induction and Supervision of Newly Appointed Staff
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16.2.1 |
All newly appointed staff, coming from within the agency or another agency, or newly qualified, should receive personalised induction and support, training and appraisal with respect to their new role. |
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16.2.2 |
The programme of induction should include:
- A full explanation of their role and responsibilities and the standard of conduct and behaviour expected;
- A full explanation of the agency's personnel procedures relating to disciplinary issues;
- Information about the agency's complaints, conflict resolution and whistle-blowing policies;
- Information about safe practice and the arrangements in place to support staff in their work;
- An introduction to the agency's child protection policies and procedures;
- A introduction to the role and activities of the Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB);
- An introduction to the agency's nominated safeguarding children adviser/s and an explanation of their role;
- Child protection training at a level appropriate to the member of staff's contact with children (as required by the LSCB);
- A full explanation of who the staff member is accountable to within their agency and also externally, within partner agencies, in relation to the safeguarding of children and young people.
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16.2.3 |
Senior managers should ensure that their staff are adequately and appropriately supervised and that they have ready access to advice, expertise and management support in all matters relating to safeguarding and child protection. |
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16.2.4 |
Regular review meetings between the appointee and responsible manager should be convened, by the manager, throughout the induction period ensuring that the appointee has ready access to advice, expertise and management support in all matters relating to safeguarding and child protection. |
16.3
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Supervision and Support
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16.3.1 |
Within all agencies that have operational responsibility for child protection services there should be an agency policy that defines levels of supervision for those staff who are accountable for child protection cases. |
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16.3.2 |
Such supervision should ensure that child protection cases are regularly discussed, and the outcome of the discussions, recorded and signed by both supervisor and supervisee. Copies should be held by both the manager and the member of staff. |
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16.3.3 |
This includes the supervisor regularly reading the case files to review and record in the file whether the work undertaken is appropriate to the child's current needs and circumstances, and is in accordance with the agency's responsibilities. |
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16.3.4 |
On some occasions (e.g. enquiries about complex abuse or allegations against colleagues) agencies should consider the provision of additional individual or group staff support. |
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16.3.5 |
Supervision policy and practice must maximise staff safety and remain alert to the possibility that some staff may be anxious about personal safety and yet reluctant to acknowledge their concern. There are occasions when a risk assessment should be undertaken regarding employee safety, this must include their emotional well being as well as any physical risk. There is an increasing awareness of the impact on workers of dealing with some extreme personality disorder cases. This casework may require specialist supervision in addition to usual case management supervision. |
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16.3.6 |
Managers should take care that they are handling an appropriate number of direct reports to ensure that each supervisee is receiving an adequate level of support. |
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16.3.7 |
Supervision should form part of day-to-day staff support, which should also include systems and procedures for:
- Managing workloads;
- Managing, sharing and reporting individual and aggregated client information;
- Staff to easily access advice, expertise and management support (including recognition of need for additional support in particular cases or circumstances);
- Protecting staff from violence and harassment, from clients and staff;
- Maintaining quality standards e.g. regular audits of cases that involve children, including those in adult and mental health teams;
- Staff, contractors or clients to complain or blow the whistle;
- Effective staff appraisal and managing poor practice.
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16.3.8 |
Clinical staff in the NHS must attend both management and child protection supervision. Line managers in health settings have a responsibility to support clinical staff into one of the forms of clinical supervision which best meets their clinical needs and allow protected time to attend. Clinicians must highlight with their manager if supervision is not meeting their needs so a different model can be considered. |
16.4
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Single Agency Training
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16.4.1 |
Individual agencies are responsible for ensuring that their staff are competent and confident in carrying out their responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting children's welfare. |
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16.4.2 |
All front line staff must be trained to pass calls about the safety of children to the appropriate professional staff. This includes reception and switchboard operators and administrative staff. Appropriate to their role, staff should also have an awareness of / access to information about local resources / agencies as well as awareness of / access to information about central / local government policy and practice in relation to child welfare |
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16.4.3 |
Single agency training and training to ensure that staff are aware of how to recognise and respond to safeguarding concerns, including signs of possible maltreatment, should always equip staff for multi-agency work. All training in this field should be consistent with the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge. |
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16.4.4 |
The Common Core of Skills and Knowledge for the Children's Workforce sets out six areas of expertise that everyone working with children, young people and families, including those who work as volunteers, should be able to demonstrate. These are:
- Child development (physical and psychological);
- Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, including risk of harm and protection factors;
- Effective communication and engagement (listening to and involving children and working with parents and families);
- Supporting transitions (maximising children's achievements and opportunities and understanding their rights and responsibilities);
- Multi-agency working (working across professional and agency boundaries);
- Sharing information.
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16.4.5 |
Depending on their role, staff working with children may also need training to ensure that they are competent in the following areas:
- Assessing children's developmental needs and their parents' capacity to respond to their needs, in the context of their family and environmental factors including their school and community;
- An understanding of the impact of disability on the child and family;
- Understanding the specific needs of children in specific circumstances and responding to their needs, including through referral and joint working;
- Identifying the early signs of developmental disorders (such as autistic spectrum disorder and language disorder) and mental health problems (such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, eating disorders, substance misuse and deliberate self-harm);
- Recognising inequalities and ethnic diversity and addressing them pro-actively;
- Promoting healthy lifestyles and directing families to local services;
- Issues of confidentiality, consent and information sharing;
- Complaints, advocacy and rights;
- Record keeping.
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16.4.6 |
Health professionals who are prescribing or administering medicines for children and young people must have the common core skills and knowledge set out above, but must also be competent in:
- The safe and effective use of medicines in children;
- Calculating drug doses, and administering medicines to children;
- Understanding the risks and benefits of medicines in relation to children;
- The needs of ethnic minorities, and cultural differences in beliefs about illness and the use of medicines;
- Accessing best evidence on the effectiveness of medicines;
- Giving information on medicines to children and parents in a clear way;
- Concordance, including active listening and shared decision-making with children and parents; and
- The recording of significant events and their use in multi-disciplinary and multi-agency audits.
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Agency's responsibilities
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16.4.7 |
All agencies have a responsibility to identify adequate resources and support for single and multi-agency training by:
- Allocating time and releasing staff to complete single and multi-agency training tasks effectively;
- Ensuring that members of staff receive relevant single-agency training which enables them to maximise the learning derived from multi-agency training, and have opportunities to consolidate learning from multi-agency training;
- Providing staff who have the relevant expertise to support the LSCB (for example, by sitting on a LSCB training sub-group, and / or contributing to training);
- Contributing to the planning, resourcing, delivery and evaluation of training.
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16.4.8 |
Training programmes should be tailored to address the identified needs of staff at different levels in the agency and stages of professional development. |
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Specialist training
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16.4.9 |
All relevant settings should have staff who are competent to complete a common assessment for a child, and contribute collaboratively to a child in need assessment of the child's developmental needs, and the capacity of their parents to respond to the child's needs within the wider family and community in which they live. |
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16.4.10 |
Specialist single and multi-agency training should be provided for nominated child protection advisers / designated and named professionals, child protection specialists, key workers and senior managers, governors and members with special responsibility for children, to enable them to fulfil their responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. |
16.5
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Multi-agency Training
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16.5.1 |
The purpose of training for multi-agency work is to help develop and foster the following in order to achieve better outcomes for children and young people:
- A shared understanding of the tasks, processes, principles, and roles and responsibilities outlined in national guidance and local arrangements for safeguarding children and promoting their welfare;
- More effective and integrated services at both the strategic and individual case level;
- Improved communication between professionals including a common understanding of key terms, definitions, and thresholds for action;
- Effective working relationships, including an ability to work in multidisciplinary groups or teams, sound decision making based on information sharing, thorough assessment, critical analysis, and professional judgement.
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16.5.2 |
Employers also have a responsibility to identify adequate resources and support for multi-agency training by:
- Providing staff who have the relevant expertise to support the LSCB (for example, by sitting on a LSCB training sub-group, and/or contributing to training);
- Allocating the time required to complete multi-agency training tasks effectively;
- Releasing staff to attend the appropriate multi-agency training courses;
- Ensuring that members of staff receive relevant single-agency training which enables them to maximise the learning derived from multi-agency training, and have opportunities to consolidate learning from multi-agency training; and
- Contributing to the planning, resourcing, delivery and evaluation of training.
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16.6
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Training Course Content
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Content for all audiences |
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16.6.1 |
All training in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children should create an ethos which values working collaboratively with others, respects diversity (including culture, race and disability), promotes equality, is child centred and promotes the participation of children and families in safeguarding processes. |
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16.6.2 |
Inter and multi-agency work is an essential feature of all training in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. |
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Target audiences
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16.6.3 |
It is important to ensure that the training involves and is available to all relevant partners. Some agencies involved in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children may not be part of a local children's trust. The LSCB should ensure that the needs of those partners are included when setting up training arrangements. |
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16.6.4 |
Training and development for inter- and multi-agency work should be targeted at the following professional groups from voluntary, statutory and independent agencies:
- These will be people who are in a position to identify concerns about maltreatment, including those which may arise from use of the Common Assessment Framework, and who, as a minimum, need introductory training on how to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children;
- Those who work regularly with children and young people, and with adults who are carers, and who may be asked to contribute to assessments of Children in Need. This group should have a fuller understanding of how to work together to identify and assess concerns, to plan, undertake and review interventions;
- Those with a particular responsibility for safeguarding children, such as designated or named health and education professionals, police, social workers, and other professionals undertaking s47 enquiries or working with complex cases, including fabricated and induced illness. Those in this group need to have a thorough understanding of working together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, including in complex and / or serious cases.
For further detail on training for the different audiences see: 'Working Together to Safeguard Children' at the Every Child Matters website. |
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16.6.5 |
Training and development for inter and multi-agency working should also be targeted at the following managers:
- Operational managers at all levels, within agencies employing staff to work with children and families, or with responsibility for commissioning or delivering services;
- Those who have a strategic and managerial responsibility for commissioning and delivering services for children and families. This includes those in each of the agencies listed in section 11 of the Children Act 2004;
- Members of LSCBs, school governors', trustees etc. LSCBs and other local bodies such as Children and Young People Strategic Partnerships should consider their own collective development needs as a group.
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16.6.6 |
Training should be available at a number of levels to address the learning needs of these staff. Decisions should be made locally about how the levels are most appropriately delivered, as part of the planning of training. |
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16.6.7 |
The detailed content of training at each level of the framework should be specified locally. The content should reflect the principles, values and processes set out in this guidance on work with children and families. Steps should be taken to ensure the relevance of the content to different groups from the statutory, voluntary, and independent sectors. The content of training programmes should be regularly reviewed and updated in the light of research and practice experience. |
16.7
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Roles and Responsibilities
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Role of the children's trust |
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16.7.1 |
Local authorities with their partners in children's trusts are responsible for ensuring that workforce strategies are developed in their local area. This includes making sure that training opportunities to meet needs identified by the LSCBs are available. They should establish systems for the delivery of single agency and multi-agency training on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. They should consider in discussion with the LSCB which bodies should commission or deliver the training. |
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Role of the LSCB
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16.7.2 |
The LSCB is responsible for developing policies for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in the area of the authority in relation to the training of persons working with children or in services affecting the safety and welfare of children. This includes training in relation to the child death review processes and serious case reviews. |
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16.7.3 |
LSCBs should contribute to, and work within, the framework of the workforce strategy. They should manage the identification of training needs and use this information to inform the planning and commissioning of training. The LSCB should check and evaluate single and inter-agency training to ensure it is meeting local needs, for example, that staff within agencies are receiving relevant training. In some areas it may be agreed that the LSCB will deliver the training itself. |
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16.7.4 |
The LSCB should ensure that it is appropriately staffed and has sufficient capacity to take forward any training and development work it carries out. This includes having the necessary administrative support, and having adequate resources both to contribute to the planning of training and development, and to evaluate it. Clearly, appropriate resources will be required if the LSCB has responsibility for commissioning or delivering training itself. |
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16.7.5 |
Effective training on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is most likely to be achieved if there is a member of the LSCB with lead responsibility for training, a training sub-group which this LSCB member is responsible for, and suitably skilled staff to take forward the training and development work of the LSCB. |
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16.7.6 |
Many areas maintain an multi-agency training panel of suitably skilled and experienced professionals and managers from LSCB member agencies who work together to design, deliver and evaluate multi-agency training. The effectiveness of this approach relies on having a skilled person to co-ordinate and develop the panel, and on the allocation of time to enable panel members to undertake this work. |
16.8
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Success Factors
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16.8.1 |
All training to support single and multi-agency work should be delivered by trainers who:
- Are knowledgeable about safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and have facilitation skills. When delivering training on complex cases trainers should have the relevant specialist knowledge and skills;
- Are informed by current research evidence, lessons from serious case and child death reviews, and local and national developments;
- Have a good understanding of the rights of the child and be informed by an active respect for diversity and the experience of service users, and a commitment to ensuring equality of opportunity;
- Have their work regularly evaluated and reviewed to ensure that it meets the agreed learning outcomes.
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16.8.2 |
Training on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children can only be fully effective if it is embedded within a wider framework of commitment to good collaborative working within and between agencies, underpinned by shared values and goals, and planning, commissioning and delivery processes. It is most likely to be effective if it is delivered within a framework that includes:
- A clear mandate from senior managers (e.g. through the LSCB), with endorsement and commitment from member agencies;
- Adequate resources and capacity to deliver or commission training;
- Consistent, high standards of practice (see Standards for Inter-Agency Working, Education and Training, developed by Salford University);
- Policies, procedures, and practice guidelines to inform and support these standards;
- Opportunities to consolidate learning made available within agencies;
- The identification and regular review of local training needs using standards for practice, followed by decisions about priorities;
- A training strategy that makes clear the difference between single agency and multi-agency training responsibilities and which partnerships or bodies are responsible for commissioning and delivering training;
- Structures and processes for organising and co-ordinating delivery;
- Systems for the delivery of multi-agency training;
- Quality assurance processes (e.g. as part of evaluation processes put in place by the LSCB);
- The framework should take account of, where possible, local research and demographic information, as well as information about the local children and young people's plan etc.
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16.8.3 |
The systems should foster collaboration across agencies and disciplines in relation to planning, design, delivery, and administration of the training. They should be efficient as well as being designed to promote co-operation and shared ownership of the training. Training may be delivered more effectively if there is collaboration across local areas, especially where police or health boundaries embrace more than one local authority area. |
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16.8.4 |
The government has commissioned a number of training resources which are suitable for multi-agency training. Safeguarding children - a shared responsibility (2006) is a multi-media training resource to support learners to:
- Have a clear understanding of what to do when they have concerns about a child's welfare;
- Know how to work as part of a multi-agency or multi-disciplinary team when following the processes set out in this guidance;
- Be clear of their roles and responsibilities during assessment, planning, intervention and reviewing processes for Children in Need, including those requiring safeguarding; and
- Understand the statutory requirements governing consent, confidentiality, and information sharing, and how to apply these in relation to a particular child about whom they have concerns.
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