Agenda item

To present the Brent Safeguarding Children Partnership (BSCP) annual report covering the period from 1 October 2022 to 31 March 2024.

The Chair welcomed Keith Makin (Independent Chair and Scrutineer, Brent Safeguarding Children Forum) to the meeting and invited him to introduce the item.

Keith Makin began by highlighting the similarities and coherence between the children’s and adult’s safeguarding arrangements, whilst also noting the different legislation and guidance, which was outlined in the report. He advised members that the key role of the partnership was to ensure that the three statutory partners – police, health, and the Council / local authority – worked closely together on safeguarding and were well sighted on strategic priorities that needed to be developed and achieved. The partnership was also required by legislation to produce an annual report. In addition to this, the partners were tasked with ensuring that that the learning and development programme and strategy was developed based on what was happening in Brent and nationally. Part of the safeguarding arrangements were to carry out safeguarding children practice reviews and rapid reviews, which he felt were developed very well in Brent. His role as Chair was to be a critical friend and ensure that challenge between partners happened in a healthy way. There was a small Safeguarding Partners Executive Group which he was a member of and a much wider Brent Safeguarding Children Forum which had a large range of partners including people from the community, voluntary organisations, education, hospital trusts and mental health providers.

Councillor Grahl (Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Schools) added that there were some very longstanding relationships within the Brent safeguarding partnership and an institutional culture of openness and honesty, which she saw as crucial to safeguarding. She concluded by highlighting that the learning that took place within the partnership filtered through to all aspects of children’s social care in Brent.

The Chair thanked Keith Makin and the Cabinet Member for their introduction and invited comments and questions from those present, with the following issues raised:

The Committee began by asking Keith what he had found coming into the partnership that he felt worked very well in Brent, and where he felt there needed to be some further focus. In response, Keith Makin advised that he had worked across a number of partnerships both in London and nationally, and one of the roles of the Independent Scrutineer was to bring experience from other places, including national developments, to make comparisons and bring in good practice. He had witnessed partnerships at different stages of development, and felt that the ‘wow’ factor in Brent was that colleagues had been very welcoming, open, and the discussions he had with different agencies and partners had been very mature. He had been impressed by the level of involvement from GPs which he highlighted was strong in Brent compared to other places he had worked. The Partnership Managers were also very supportive, and he offered thanks for their work. In terms of work in progress and areas for focus and improvement, there had been four areas of development recommended by the most recent Ofsted inspection which was influencing the way the partnership was developing and working for the next twelve months. One of the areas of focus for the partnership was around working more closely with adults’ safeguarding colleagues and continuing the good work already started around the transition from childhood to adulthood, with a recommendation for that transitions age range to be between 14 – 25 years old. Another focus area was around data collection, refining the data so that more meaningful analysis could take place, learning from various audits and rapid reviews to feed in to that data analysis. One example of that work being taken forward was following a multi-agency audit on a number of cases involving young girls where there had been an emerging pattern of undiagnosed or unrecognised neurodiversity, usually ASD, which had led to later problems. As a result of that analysis of the data, a priority around that theme had been established for the next reporting period. He highlighted this as a good example of working together to identify some of the issues within that theme such as the national issues with CAMHS waiting lists and the availability of specialist resource. Another area of development for partners was to engage more with children and young people across the borough and getting the lived and felt experience of children and young people into the various partnership settings. Keith Makin and partners hoped that when the annual report was presented the following year the voice of the child would come through and that the partners could provide real examples of how children and young people had been brought in.

The Chair then invited members of Brent Youth Parliament to contribute. Following on from Keith Makin’s response, Brent Youth Parliament asked how the partnership planned to bring the voice of young people into the work. They were advised that the partnership had not yet worked that out as there was a want to do that in collaboration with children and young people. Keith Makin highlighted that the first stage of the work would be to engage with children and young people from all of the different settings they were a part of. One thing that other places were doing that Brent could consider would be to have young scrutineers form part of the arrangements and he had some personal experience of successful outcomes from that.

Brent Youth Parliament asked whether there were any youth representatives currently sitting on any of the groups. Keith Makin advised that there were currently no youth representatives in formal safeguarding settings, i.e. the Safeguarding Partnership Executive Group, the Safeguarding Forum, the Multi-Agency Audit Group, or the Case Review Group. Palvinder Kudhail (Director Early Help and Social Care, Brent Council) added that there were examples of youth representation within Brent in other teams that could be modelled and built upon, working with children and young people to see what would work best. For example, some groups viewed videos or listened to podcasts made by young people to hear their experiences and what they were feeling. Young people attended the Corporate Parenting Committee on a regular basis and would speak on a particular theme and run workshops for Committee members. There were also young people recruited to do visits to commissioned accommodation from semi-independent providers and who had conducted interviews for officers in the Participation Team. The Committee was encouraged and hoped for further engagement with young people in the future.

The Committee asked how much engagement with parents and families took place when it came to children’s safeguarding. Palvinder Kudhail explained that when a referral was received the first step was to make contact with the child’s parent or carer, where appropriate, and the assessment was then done very closely with the parent or carer, where appropriate, so that they were clear about what the concerns were and how there was a need to work together to address the issues and avoid escalation. There were some situations where some information would not be shared with parents or carers initially if that put the child at risk but otherwise the approach was very much to work with parents, carers and the wider family.

The Committee asked what other engagement the partnership had with other agencies as well as other local authorities. Keith Makin explained that there were several levels of engagement with various organisations including strong and increasing relationships with neighbouring boroughs on safeguarding issues. The Partnership Managers across NWL worked closely together and there was a Pan-London grouping for Chair’s of safeguarding forums. There was also learning taken from other partnership’s safeguarding practice reviews, audits and outcomes. For example, at a recent Case Review Group meeting there was a live example from another borough who had learnt a lot from a particular case that Brent’s group then studied and analysed. The membership of the Forum was also broad and contributed lively discussions and presentations from various organisations. That included two lay members who made valuable contributions to the Forum and community and voluntary organisations specialising in children’s services. There was also a central mailing list for communications to independent sector organisations who may not be involved in the Forum but for whom it would be useful for them to receive certain information from themes coming out of safeguarding activity. At an operational level, there was detailed activity across local authorities, such as where a young person might be in another borough but going to school in Brent or where a young person may have associations which spanned a number of local authorities. For example, where county lines was a factor and there may be victims and perpetrators spread across a large geographical area, the partnership would include all agencies who were aware of those young people and those agencies would come together to do some mapping looking at hotspot areas and common issues and draw in professionals involved with those young people where necessary. Councillor Grahl added that where she had seen examples of safeguarding issues that spanned boroughs she had been impressed at the quality of collaboration between different boroughs and agencies.

The Committee asked whether the partnership did outreach work in schools on certain topics such as bullying or knife crime. Keith Makin confirmed that there were initiatives in Brent jointly between the police and other agencies which the partnership was closely involved in. Andrew Brien (Detective Superintendent, NW BCU – Metropolitan Police) explained that he did not have any examples in Brent as he was new in post but had done this type of work previously and looked forward to progressing that in Brent. For example, working with Safer Schools Officers, he had been programmes covering knife crime, substance misuse and domestic abuse. The police had also been engaging with young people through youth ambassadors, who had created a series of videos where young people explained what it was like to experience a stop and search, which had been very useful for police officers to understand the impact of being spoken to by a police officer and then searched. Councillor Grahl added information about an outreach programme called ‘My Ends 2.0’, for which funding had been secured from the GLA. The programme was being delivered by the Community Safety Team and provided funding to youth organisations across the borough working to reduce violent crime. A large amount of work on this had been done in conjunction with grassroots organisations, particularly focused in areas where violent crime was known to be higher such as Harlesden and Stonebridge.

The Committee highlighted the valuable resource of schools and school settings in helping to identify safeguarding issues and helping to prevent or reduce safeguarding incidents, including having a Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) for every school. Often safeguarding issues could be identified through schools from very low-level activity such as a change in behaviour or increased absences. Keith Makin agreed that education settings were a very important part of the partnership. The partnership was currently working on ensuring education partners from all education settings were tied into the partnership. There had been an expectation that the government’s most recent iteration of Working Together 2023 guidance would introduce education formally as a fourth statutory partner but that had not come to fruition. Although there was no formal requirement, there had been discussions and agreement locally in Brent to treat education as if it were a fourth partner, so the partnership was working closely with someone from the Department for Education (DfE) to help bring that representative in and was speaking with education specialists and leaders across the borough in all settings, including non-formal settings such as home education and the Brent Virtual School. While that work was ongoing, there was incorporation of education establishments in the partnership through the Safeguarding Forum with many of those school representatives being members of staff with direct oversight of safeguarding within their school. A list of represented schools was outlined in the report, and the partnership also linked in with the DSL network.

Continuing to discuss schools, the Committee asked whether they were adopting a more robust approach to bullying, online bullying, and, as a direct consequence sometimes, self-harming. Members were advised that schools had very robust safeguarding structures in place and were mandated to do so, with nominated individuals who had that oversight within each school. Part of the processes within schools was dealing with bullying, which was also examined by Ofsted.

The Chair then invited Brent Youth Parliament to ask further questions. Representatives asked whether partners felt there was a stigma in relation to mental health for young people and whether the partnership was doing anything to tackle that. Keith Makin responded that he personally felt there was an element of stigma and lack of understanding around mental health issues for young people and this was something the partnership was focused on. A multi-agency audit conducted recently had identified some of the difficulties that children and young people and their families experienced in accessing mental health services as well. He felt that part of addressing that would be to hear from children and young people and families collectively in relation to what is good or poor about the system. He added that, collectively, society was not understanding the pressures children and young people were under and how that could lead to mental health problems. Sue Sheldon (Assistant Director for Safeguarding Adults and Children, Brent Council) added that there was a traditional way of tackling mental health issues through CAMHS which did not always reach all young people so work was being done to look at alternative pathways and review mental health services in the borough.

Brent Youth Parliament asked whether the partnership had a plan for tackling gang violence. Keith Makin highlighted that Zoe Tattersall (Strategic Partnerships Lead for Safeguarding Children, Brent Council) and he had met with the Senior Police Officer leading on gang violence across the borough who had described the situation across the borough in detail, which had been helpful to understand, but there was not a developed plan on tackling that yet. He highlighted this as a primary concern that the partnership would want to concentrate on. Andrew Brien added to the discussion, highlighting that gang violence was multi-faceted and the police in particular wanted to focus on exploitation, targeting those who recruited young people to join criminal gangs. If the police were able to identify those recruiting at the stem then that helped to reduce gang crime and violence significantly. Additionally, the police were able to enforce gang injunction orders which were civil orders placed on young people through the Crown Court which restricted particular behaviours of that person, such as restricting them to only one mobile phone, forbidding their interactions with certain named individuals or prohibiting their ability to access certain locations, which helped to reduce and prevent gang violence.

In terms of how the partners collaborated and communicated with each other to resolve safeguarding issues, Palvinder Kudhail highlighted that information was shared at a very early stage. When a referral was received by the Brent Family Front Door (BFFD), depending on the seriousness of the referral, all partner agencies would be asked to share the information they already had about that person and their family. The BFFD was a multi-agency team with police and health colleagues present physically in the civic centre, making that information flow easily. That collaboration then continued as part of the assessment and plan for that person, which would be individualised depending on the needs of the young person and the family.

Noting that there were separate but similar arrangements for safeguarding children and safeguarding adults, and the aim across the next year for the two groups to work more closely together, the Committee asked how the partnerships collaborated and communicated to resolve safeguarding issues so that work was not done in isolation between the two groups. Nicola Brownjohn (Independent Chair, Safeguarding Adults Board) explained that this workstream was building on the work done previously around transitional safeguarding, recognising that if, for example, a child was running county lines then there may well be an adult who was being cuckooed as well. The two partnerships wanted to look at exploitation together as it was clear that this did not stop once the young person reached the age of 18. A Joint Executive Group was also being established, made up of senior leaders for both adults and children’s safeguarding and both Chairs to meet on a semi-regular basis and discuss joint or overlapping issues.

The Chair thanked those present for their contributions and drew the item to a close. He invited members to make recommendations with the following RESOLVED:

i)              To recommend that the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee formally endorse the inclusion of education as a fourth partner within children’s safeguarding arrangements.

ii)             To recommend that the Committee continued to monitor the police improvement plans being implemented across the Metropolitan Police and within the NW BCU in view of the comments in the paper.

iii)           To formally invite Keith Makin to accompany the Chair of the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee to the next Brent Youth Parliament event.

iv)           In relation to the commitment to develop data collection outlined in the report, to recommend that the next report details what the current system for data collection and analysis is and what the improvement over the period was.