Lambeth Safeguarding Children Board

LSBC: Lambeth Safeguarding Children Board

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Lambeth Safeguarding Children�s Board Constitution:

Untitled Document Constitution :

Lambeth Safeguarding Children’s Board Constitution:

Board Objectives

The Lambeth Safeguarding Children’s Board (LSCB) is a statutory multi agency board with key responsibility for agreeing how each relevant organization in Lambeth will work together to safeguard to promote and welfare of children in Lambeth, and for ensuring the effectiveness of this work.

The core objectives of the Board are as set out in section 14(1) of the Children Act 2004 as follows:

to co-ordinate what is done by each person or body represented on the Board for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in Lambeth, and
to ensure the effectiveness of what is done by each such person or body for that purpose

Scope of LSCB:

The LSCB has a broad scope which includes safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in three broad areas of activity:

1. Universal: affects all children and aims to identify and prevent maltreatment or improvement of health or development, to ensure children are growing up in circumstances consistent with safe and effective care. For example:

Increasing understanding of safeguarding children’s issues in the professional and wider community
Promoting the message that safeguarding is everybody’s responsibility
Ensuring organisations working in contact with children operate recruitment and human resources procedures that take account of the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children

2. Targeted:

Proactive work targeting particular groups
Developing/evaluating thresholds and procedures for children in need
Safeguarding children living away from home, privately fostered, children in custody, children who have run away from home, disabled children

3. Specialist: responsive work, to protect children who are suffering, or at risk of suffering harm. For example:

Children abused through prostitution
Children abused outside families by adults known to them
Forced marriage
Female genital mutilation

The LSCB will limit its scope up to March 2009 to securing its core business first.

The vision, priorities and strategy of the LSCB is set out in the Strategic Plan 2008 – 11.

Relationship with Children’s Trust and other strategic forums.

The LSCB has statutory responsibility for ensuring the safety and welfare of children in Lambeth. It is not accountable to the Children’s Trust or subsumed into it, but works with the Children’s Trust to ensure that safeguarding is integrated into it’s planning and service commissioning. The LSCB retains a separate identity and voice. The Children’s Trust formally consults the LSCB about the Children and Young People’s Plan to ensure that the LSCB can scrutinize its planning arrangements in respect to safeguarding. The LSCB is accountable to elected Members through the Scrutiny Committee, which meets once every six months.

Structure:

The LSCB is a single board made up of executive members from key statutory agencies and supported by their named designated professional that meets six times a year. There are eight groups that currently service the LSCB and report back to it.

Roles and responsibilities of Executive members:

Under section 11 of the Children’s Act 2004 each agency has a statutory responsibility to cooperate with the LSCB and work with it to deliver better safeguarding outcomes.

Each agency must nominate an executive member to the LSCB. In order to be an executive member (or a delegated executive representative to the LSCB) it is essential that they have the authority to carry out the following -

To be able to speak for their agency
To be able to hold their agency to account and challenge it
To be able to make LSCB decisions about safeguarding and allocate resources

Executive members (or their representatives): -

Carry political ownership and responsibility for safeguarding in Lambeth
Act as a lead for their own agency and a conduit between the agency and the board, being accountable for implementing safeguarding policy and practice within operational service
Agree the strategic direction, priorities and targets and make decisions on behalf of the LSCB
Link and coordinate with other Executive fora (e.g. CYPP, Children’s Trust)
Agree the LSCB work plan
Allocate the work to LSCB sub committees and monitor progress.
Direct members of staff within their organizations to attend relevant sub committees and comply with requirements to deliver pieces of work requested by that group. Executive members must hold their own agencies to account for attendance and contribution where deemed mandatory.
Set the annual budget for the LSCB office and allocate the resources required to achieve the aims of the work plan
Call to account their own agencies for their contribution in the sub committees
Monitor and ensure the quality and effectiveness of safeguarding in Lambeth.

Note: the Children and Young People’s Service requires more than one executive member as it represents several departments. Health should comprise two hospitals, PCT and SLAM.

Executive Member Responsibilities:

To ensure that safeguarding is properly promoted, prioritised, and resourced in their organization.
To attend every LSCB meeting (or send a representative who can fulfill the criteria above) and speak on behalf of their agency.
To oversee the delivery of safeguarding in their organization, and ensure that actions, tasks set and decisions taken by the LSCB have been carried through in their organization.
To nominate a named designated professional to support them on the Board
To nominate the appropriate attendees to carry out tasks for the LSCB workgroups and ensure that they have attended and allocated tasks have been carried out with in time scale.
To contribute towards the funding of the work of the LSCB and safeguarding in Lambeth.
To ensure accountability and ownership of the outcomes for children

Role of Named Designated Professionals:

The supporting manager/s are present in their capacity as advisors to their executive member to give detailed progress reports and information about the issues on the ground.

Role:

To advise and support the executive member (or their representative) with detailed information and updates of progress, and carry back LSCB decisions and work out actions within their own agency. Bring expert and specialist knowledge about safeguarding and child protection from their own discipline. Take responsibility for setting and monitoring safeguarding standards within their agency and through their discipline and giving expert advice and consultation within their agency

To provide a reporting function to the executive member.
A named designated professional cannot make decisions at the LSCB and cannot deputise for the executive member (unless they meet the criteria set out above).

Pre Board Preparation Work:

The role of LSCB Manager is essential to prevent the LSCB being overwhelmed with extraneous detail and work.

All suggested agenda items must be passed to the LSCB Manager at least four weeks before the Board
The LSCB Manager will discuss and table the items that need to go to the Board
The LSCB Manager will act as gate keeper to the LSCB
LSCB Manager will meet with the Chair before the meeting to agree the agenda and discuss issues.
LSCB Manager will discuss the sub committee reports with Chairs of sub committees before the LSCB.
Agenda items and papers will be sent at least two weeks before the Board meeting
Sub Committees to provide written reports through their minutes
Minutes will record carefully decisions taken, actions agreed, timescales set and who has responsibility for carrying that forward and review mechanisms
LSCB Manager will monitor progress of actions between meetings and hold a meeting with chairs of sub committees.

LSCB Chair’s Responsibility:

It is the responsibility of the Local Authority, after consultation with the Board partners to appoint the Chair. The Chair will be responsible for the following:

To chair the Board meetings fairly and robustly, and challenge agencies where necessary.
To decide which cases meet the criteria for serious case review based on the recommendations of the Serious Case Review Sub committee.
To represent the need to safeguard children effectively and not the needs of their own agency (CYPS).
To draw to the attention of agencies where there are concerns about safeguarding practices and in exceptional circumstances where this cannot be resolved invoke responsibility to report to Members and Ofsted on behalf of the LSCB
To monitor whether agencies are adhering to their core responsibilities and carry out the escalation policy where necessary
To ensure the minutes accurately reflect LSCB decisions and identify lines of accountability for actions.
To ensure that sub committees are made to account for their work.

Responsibility for the delivery of the safeguarding, effective safeguarding arrangements and the work plan in Lambeth is not the sole responsibility of the Chair, but of all the agencies represented.

Role of Vice Chair

The role of the Vice Chair is to chair LSCB meetings in the absence of the Chair.

LSCB Accountability

Each LSCB agency is accountable to it’s own Chief Executive through it’s own line management system. However, the Chair of the LSCB will give account twice a year to a Scrutiny Committee and report regularly to the Member with responsibility for children. The Member with responsibility for children may sit on the Board as observers as part of their scrutiny of the LSCB, at the discretion of the Chair and the Board.

The Chair will use his/her discretion to report to Elected Members / health boards in the event of high profile Serious Case Reviews. Bi annual reports to Members will consist of an over view of the LSCB’s work, performance data and analysis, user feedback, report on work plan targets, new developments, and any politically sensitive or priority areas of work. The Chair will report Serious Case Reviews and any Internal Management Reviews.

It is the responsibility of the Chair to brief the Member with responsibility for children of any issues that potentially impede or reduce the effectiveness of safeguarding or risk damaging the Council’s credibility in safeguarding e.g. resource issues or politically sensitive cases.

Other agencies need to brief their own scrutiny committees and Boards in respect to issues arising that impeded to reduce the effectiveness of safeguarding work for children or jeopardize public confidence in their service.

LSCB Decision making Powers:

Most LSCB decisions will be taken as a matter of consensus and agreement, but in rare situations there may be disagreements between agencies. These principles are designed to give a transparent framework for resolving these, by allowing the Chair the right to take decisions without losing the confidence and sense of ownership and fairness amongst the other agencies.

Decision Making Framework:

All decisions should be sought by consensus, but in the rare case of disagreement, the Chair should take decisions after carefully weighing the following factors

Has there been adequate opportunity for information and consultation provided to agencies
What would be the impact of a delay in taking a decision on the safeguarding of children and/or on children’s services
What degree of clarity exists over the issue in terms of legislation or guidance from government, or research findings?
Is there another way to achieve consensus without losing safeguarding objectives?
CYPS are the lead agency for safeguarding work (Working Together 2006 3.46 and 3.49). However, core agencies for decision making on the LSCB around safeguarding also include the Police and PCT. A consensus by these three agencies provides critical weight to LSCB decisions where there is no Board consensus, but should be used rarely to overrule objections.
No agency can be committed on resources by the LSCB - each resource decision is a matter for one’s own agency.
Is there likely to be strong adverse publicity or other damaging consequences for the LSCB or an agency if the decision isn’t taken.
No decision should be taken by CYPS on its own (as currently providing the Chair). There must be support from at least two other agencies, one of which should be the PCT or Police as an absolute minimum.
The ultimate decision for weighing these considerations and making the decision is down to the Chair but s/he should state and record the rationale used.

Escalation Policy

Where any Executive Members are failing to carry out their responsibility to the LSCB the Chair will raise this on a one to one basis on behalf of the other agencies as a first step. Where unresolved, the concern will be formally expressed in writing by the Chair to the Chief Officer of that agency and will request a meeting to resolve the matter.

If the matter remains unresolved a formal note will be made of the concern by the agencies in the LSCB Minutes and a copy of the formal letter and minute will be sent to Ofsted and GOL for information.

Minutes

A minute will be taken of LSCB meetings and sub committees that record

Discussion
Decisions taken and their rationale
Actions agreed, who they are allocated to, and when they will be reviewed.
Actions will be reviewed at the following meeting
Attendance by agencies will be noted.

Financial Contributions:

Under section 15 of the Children’s Act 2004 agencies can make payments to the LSCB to provide the staffing for the following purposes:

to drive forward the LSCB day to day business in achieving its objectives.
to take forward any training and staff development work in the context of a local work force strategy
to provide administrative and organizational support for the Board

LSCB members are responsible for ensuring that the LSCB is properly resourced to carry out it business. A pooled budget will be agreed by agencies each year made up of direct contributions and contributions in kind.

Annual Report:

The LSCB will produce an Annual Report and a strategic plan each year to set future priorities , account for its activity, and use of resources.

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LSCB Accountability

Minutes