Agenda item

To enable members of the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee to consider the Brent Safeguarding Children Partnership multi-agency safeguarding arrangements annual report covering the period from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

Keith Makin (Brent Safeguarding Children Partnership Independent Scrutineer) introduced the Brent Safeguarding Children Partnership Annual Report which covered the reporting period from April 2024 to March 2025. He recognised from the discussion on the Safeguarding Adults Board Annual Report that the Committee would want more data and statistics included in future, which had been echoed by an LGA representative, and he would take that forward for future Annual Reports.

In introducing the report, Keith Makin advised that children’s safeguarding arrangements were made up of a 3-way partnership between health, the police, and the local authority, which was legislated in statutory guidance. The role of the partnership was to seek assurance on safeguarding, learning from local and national events through various means. To do that, a new data dashboard had been developed which was available to the various groups the partnership oversaw, aided by an audit software system called PHEW.

Over the past year as Independent Scrutineer, Keith Makin had been developing plans to work more closely with children and young people and bring their voices into the partnership. He hoped to develop a system of young scrutineers working alongside him to scrutinise the whole children’s partnership, and he had helped to introduce this arrangement in three other boroughs he worked with that Brent could learn from. The partnership was also working more closely with Community Safety, who were represented at the Safeguarding Children Forum and Case Review Group (CRG). The past year had also focused on ensuring Brent was compliant with Working Together 2023 guidance which partners were now assured of. This had resulted in some changes in governance to include Lead Safeguarding Partners who met twice yearly with high level representation from Brent Council’s Chief Executive, NWL Integrated Care Board’s Chief Executive, and the Borough Commander of NW BCU. Delegated Safeguarding Partners met more regularly as an Executive Group. The guidance had also recommended that partnerships treated education as a fourth partner, which the Delegated Safeguarding Partners were working to introduce, and education was well represented at the Safeguarding Children Forum. He advised members of the recent Online Safety Task and Finish Group that the Forum had established, which would be a priority for the next year, as well as developing data and analysis further, hearing the voice of children and young people, neurodiversity, particularly masking behaviours amongst young girls, and transitional safeguarding.

In concluding the introduction, Councillor Gwen Grahl (as Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Schools) highlighted the recent restructure of children’s social care in response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which she felt evidenced how the Council and partners had responded to the recommendations of that. She felt there were strong professional relationships amongst the partnership with good professional curiosity, accountability and healthy challenge.

The Chair thanked the presenters for their introductions and invited the Committee to ask questions of the officers, with the following points raised:

The Committee asked how learning and behaviour change was embedded so that it led to positive outcomes. Keith Makin advised that the partnership learned from a number of different sources. For the reporting period, there had been no Rapid Reviews, but the partnership had reviewed its thresholds and how they compared with other boroughs and was satisfied that this was not a cause for concern. The partnership looked at other cases, for example had recently learned from a case where a child fell from a height and a 7-minute briefing was circulated, and another case which resulted in training for staff across health and social care. The partnership’s multi-agency audit group had looked at cases surrounding mental health which had identified a need to focus on girls with autism who may be displaying masking behaviours which had resulted in services changing certain practices. Palvinder Kudhail (Director of Early Help and Social Care, Brent Council) added that partnership would always do the learning regardless of the level of risk or injury of a case. She advised that, when all relevant agencies involved in a family’s life had been pulled together and presented information regarding the case, if the issue related to a single agency then the partners were specific about what the recommendation was and what would be done, including who would follow up and when. Where it was more than one agency or widespread, a follow up plan would be implemented alongside a further audit to test the learning. This could involve talking to frontline practitioners about what they had learned and built into their practice. For example, in relation to children falling from heights, the partnership knew through the Child Death Overview Panels of 5 London local authorities that there was a pattern emerging, so work was done on a pan-London level to review that and raise awareness, which was done through all possible outlets including Family Wellbeing Centres (FWCs). Where there were national issues, the partnership also considered and explored those to reassure themselves that a similar incident would not happen within Brent.

The Committee asked what specific learning had taken place from the Child Q Safeguarding Practice Review both at a national and local level. Will Lexton-Jones (Detective Superintendent, NW BCU, Met Police) advised that substantial learning had taken place on a Met-wide level. Firstly, learning was done around the specific case and the strengthening of the STIP process as a result of that, which had then been disseminated at an organisational level to ensure everyone knew the process. Secondly, learning had been done for the broader Child First Strategy that the Met was introducing to ensure a child-centric approach to how officers interacted with young people. This had involved a whole Met training programme for frontline delivery units. Palvinder Kudhail added that specific training on adultification had been offered to all agencies. A stop and search audit had also been done, looking at how partners worked together and ensured young people were dealt with appropriately, taking on board some of the lessons from the Child Q case.

The Committee raised Awaab’s Law, which had been implemented following the death of a child due to poor housing conditions, and asked whether the partnership worked with housing colleagues, including from Housing Associations, in relation to safeguarding. Keith Makin advised that some discussions had taken place, but he felt that needed to be extended in order to be assured that the partnership was sited on what was happening within the whole housing sector, including private landlords and independent providers. Councillor Grahl felt that it was an important point regarding Housing Associations and she was working with Councillor Donnelly-Jackson (Cabinet Member for Housing) to set up a Forum for Housing Associations so that they could have a relationship with the Council.

The Committee asked how effective multi-agency working was in terms of prevention, specifically around issues such as county lines, grooming gangs and knife crime. Councillor Grahl acknowledged that these were legitimate problems within children’s safeguarding that everybody needed to be aware of, and without multi-agency arrangements it would not be possible to respond to those issues. She reassured members that there was activity locally and nationally on all of those areas. For example, Baroness Casey had audited group-based child sexual exploitation recently, which Councillor Grahl had raised with officers and tabled a discussion to respond to the recommendations of that audit. Will Lexton-Jones added that there would be a Met-wide response to Baroness Casey’s findings following a public enquiry.

In relation to online safety, Keith Makin advised that this was an emerging issue for children and young people, which was being recognised through audits and other mechanisms. It was also something that young people had told the partnership they wanted to focus on. As a Forum, a Task and Finish Group had been established to look into this, who were working with schools and designing a survey regarding mobile phone use in schools in order to establish a borough-wide approach to mobile phones in schools.

The Committee asked how well the partnership worked with other organisations such as Healthwatch and community sector organisations. Keith Makin advised that this was currently done through the Safeguarding Children Forum which included a lay member, which helped bring the partnership closer to the community. He acknowledged that having one person represent the whole of Brent was difficult, but the Forum was well engaged with schools and community organisations and was looking at bringing in more lay members. He had not yet worked with Healthwatch but intended to engage going forward. The Committee emphasised the importance of knowing the borough and community well, and highlighted other non-statutory partners the Chair could engage with such as football clubs and youth groups.

The Chair then invited representatives from Brent Youth Parliament (BYP) to contribute, who asked why all schools in the borough were not represented on the Brent Safeguarding Children Forum. Keith Makin acknowledged that he would want to have all schools across the borough represented at the Forum but it was not always possible to have that at one time. He felt that having young scrutineers would help with that as they would be able to directly engage with children and young people in schools. Palvinder Kudhail added that Brent had a very active Designated Safeguarding Lead Network, where issues and learning were shared, which was then fed back into the Forum.

As a supplementary, BYP representatives asked what the role of young scrutineers would be, what their impact would be and how they would be recruited. Keith Makin explained that the recruitment process had not yet been established but he had experience from other local partnerships of ways that had worked. He understood the need for representation across the borough and suggested co-designing the recruitment and role of the scrutineers with BYP and other young people. He envisaged that their role would be to sit on and contribute to partnership meetings to bring the voice of young people in and ensure it was always in the room. He also foresaw young scrutineers influencing the annual report and how that was written. There was ambition to start this process in the current financial year.

The Chair drew the item to a close and invited members to make recommendations with the following RESOLVED:

i)               To recommend that the Committee have sight of the work being done around online safety.

ii)              To receive a future report looking at how services are supporting young people from a transitional safeguarding perspective who are vulnerable but do not meet the threshold for Adult Social Care.

iii)             To recommend an improvement in safeguarding support for youth organisations.

iv)             For the Independent Scrutineer to contact Healthwatch to see how they can support the work of the partnership.

v)              For future reports to include more data and KPIs.

vi)             Brent Youth Parliament recommended that the partnership reach out to different youth and community groups alongside schools.