The UK Government recently set out their mission to Break Down Barriers to Opportunity where they aim to deliver across four key areas: setting every child up for the best start in life, helping every child to achieve and thrive at school, building skills for opportunity and growth and, underpinning all of these, building family security.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel is calling on the government to ensure that children who are at risk of being harmed are prioritised in this new mission to ‘Break Down Barriers to Opportunity’. This push comes as the Panel’s latest annual report reveals that 485 children were affected by serious child safeguarding incidents, where a child has died or suffered serious harm and abuse or neglect is known or suspected, between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024.

The recent reforms announced in the government paper ‘Keeping children safe, helping families thrive’ demonstrate plans to implement the Panel’s recommendation for multi-agency child protection teams in every local authority. Safeguarding children involves agencies such as policing, healthcare and education, amongst others.

The 2023 to 2024 annual report highlighted three areas which reinforce the importance of different government departments working together at a national level: safeguarding children with mental health needs, safeguarding pre-school children with parents with mental health needs, and safeguarding children from risks outside the family home.

Safeguarding children with mental health needs

As part of the government’s ‘opportunities’ mission, it is vital that the Department for Health and Social Care, NHS England, and other relevant bodies work with the Department for Education to ensure there is sufficient and appropriate mental health support available for vulnerable children.

Safeguarding pre-school children with parents with mental health needs

Over half of the incidents involving the death or serious harm of a child aged one to five involved a parent or carer with a mental health condition. Reviews highlighted that parental mental health was often overlooked as a risk factor when considering their capacity to look after children.

With the new Mental Health Bill, the Panel is calling for greater measures for supporting effective partnership working between adult mental health services and children’s services.

Safeguarding children from risks outside the family

Almost a quarter of serious incidents feature harm inflicted by adults and peers who were not members of the child’s own family. This includes child sexual abuse and child criminal exploitation.

The Panel argues that there must be a joint effort between the Home Office and other relevant departments to ensure vulnerable children are not forgotten.

Each of the three areas highlighted by the report gives an example of where different agencies can work together to produce positive outcomes for children.

Panel Chair Anne Hudson said “Only when teachers, doctors, social workers, nurses, police and other professionals share information together is it possible to understand what is happening in a child’s life and make the timely and sensitive decisions that may be necessary.”

Maria Neophytou, interim CEO at the NSPCC, joined Anne Hudson in saying that “to deliver on its commitment to ‘raise the healthiest generation of children ever’ the new Government must take a joined-up approach to transforming childhoods and tacking abuse and neglect. They can do this by ensuring vital, early help services are more widely available to support families before problems escalate to crisis point and children are harmed.”

This comes in the wake of the murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif who was murdered by her father and stepmother. Her father has been found to have had repeated contact with social services and police, and Sara’s school had made a referral to social services five months before her death. This provides an image of what can happen if agencies do not effectively work together to protect vulnerable children.

The report also concludes that too many reviews showed a limited reflection and consideration on the impact of children’s race and ethnicity. This finding, along with the conclusion that there needs to be a greater push on agencies to work jointly, demonstrates the report’s aim to look at Child Safeguarding in a more holistic way.

This move is analogous to a theme which was explored in a previous Abuse & Neglect blog post in terms of adult safeguarding. Section 14 of the Care and Support statutory guidance defines adult safeguarding as being “about people and organisations working together to prevent and stop both the risks and experience of abuse or neglect.” This, along with the Report and its findings, represents this new overall push in all areas of Safeguarding.

As a result of this more holistic approach to child safeguarding, organisations and agencies may anticipate increased scrutiny of their practices. A new focus with increased stringency may be required to be adopted by such organisations and agencies to ensure that their practices, and the way in which they combine their practices with those of other agencies, robustly comply with the findings and recommendations of this report and the foreseeable shift in attitudes this will have.