The Executive in partnership with safeguarding partners set the priorities for the LSCP. The expectation is for sub-groups to drive the agreed priorities to explore and provide assurance of the effectiveness of the safeguarding system. The constant need to ensure they remain relevant and are evaluated to ensure progress against the priorities are a significant role for Executive and sub-groups. This also involves providing assurance of completed actions, evidencing impact for change and identifying areas for improvement.
The current priorities have been in place since 2018 and the Executive Board now wish to revise the priorities with stakeholders to ensure they remain relevant and to seek assurances on their progress. Furthermore, to ensure they are owned and driven by the sub-groups and the LCYPP.
The current priorities:
- Domestic Abuse and the impact on Children
- Vulnerable Learners
- Exploitation
Children and Young People Experiencing Domestic Abuse
The priority was overseen by the Independent Chair who sought assurances across the system for children and young people growing up in a household with domestic abuse. The theme of domestic abuse continues to be a consistent theme across learning from local Rapid Reviews which highlights the devastating consequences for children and young people. This also included witnessing domestic abuse which is identified as one of ten traumatic events or circumstances that research demonstrates increases the risk of adult mental health problems and life-threatening disease before the age of 60. Research repeatedly demonstrates that specialist support services for children reduces the impact of domestic abuse and improves children’s safety and health outcomes.
The Domestic Abuse Bill gained Royal Assent on 29th April 2021 and is now signed into law. This Act lays the foundations to reshape how society responds to domestic abuse, following successful campaigns to ensure it recognises children of domestic abuse for what they are, victims. The Act explicitly recognises children as victims if they see, hear, or experience the effects of abuse. For child victims of domestic abuse, the success of this Act will depend on partnerships and leadership in responding to and supporting children so that they recover from the trauma they’ve experienced.
In response to this new Bill, the LSCP Independent Chair undertook a city-wide review with support from the LSCP and Safer Leeds Executive, exploring how effectively children witnessing and experiencing domestic violence and abuse are supported and protected by agencies across the city of Leeds. The findings from this review were also presented to the Leeds Domestic Violence Programme Board and an example of partnership engagement that had led to strong joint partner working, leading to on-going safer outcomes for children and young people.
The following details the progress against the Children Experiencing Domestic Abuse Priority:
- A Designated Safeguarding Lead Reference Group was established and continues because of this review. The group contributed to the discussion based on their experiences of improvements to the school notification process, which clearly required improvements. The role of education is central to safeguarding children and young people and this review highlighted the challenges of information sharing and communication between the school and reports to the school of domestic abuse. There is a real challenge of ensuring timely accurate information as it some schools reported children were not recorded in the household when present. West Yorkshire Police responded by issuing guidance on ensuring the recording of children to frontline police officers when attending domestic violence incidents.
- Operation Encompass is a process whereby the police report all domestic abuse incidents directly to the school. It was clear that schools referred to this, however, Leeds does not have the full Operation Encompass model that enables a wealth of information, including a free child psychologist helpline to support both children and practitioners and the reporting of children affected by domestic abuse to go directly to a call centre. This is an area that requires improvement, and all education providers stated the need to have a system whereby all domestic abuse reports of children are directly reported to the school and in good time. This has led to the creation of a task and finish group in April 2022 led by Children’s Social Work Services with support from Safer Stronger Communities and partners. The group is exploring opportunities to improve the current school notifications systems and processes, including ensuring notifications during holiday periods, cross border notifications and improving the quality and timeliness of information shared with schools. The majority of Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL’s) stated that they had officers on duty during school holidays and would be available to receive information which would enable them to prepare support for children and young people.
- A Healthy Relationships task and finish group was established to explore current practice and opportunities in relation to RSE/PSHE and responses to the My Health My School Survey (MHMS) focusing on schools and further education settings that have engaged with the review. The survey provides several questions as an opportunity to hear the voice of children. There is currently one question related to domestic abuse, however, there is a need to understand how the Education Sector use this information to inform the delivery of Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) session you young people. Most of the education settings involved in this review shared how they rarely used this information to inform their practice, and this remains a missed opportunity for the partnership.
- In December 2021 West Yorkshire Police produced guidance and a bulletin to all front-line police officers on the importance of seeing all children present at a domestic violence incident and recording all children living in a household. This was due to officers not recording all children present and not providing detailed information on the presentation of the child. First responders are now given information about repeat domestic abuse incidents. All officers have handheld devices which they can use to research those present at a Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) incident including children. Checks are continually being made to make sure that improvements are being seen in the information collected by police officers. This is being monitored through the Operation Encompass Task and Finish Group.
- The Elective Home Education (EHE) Notification form did not have a question related to domestic abuse, this has now been updated and the electronic form now includes a key question for schools “are you aware of any domestic abuse incidents within the family”. The form was updated and came into use at the end of March 2022. Work is now being undertaken to ensure that all schools use the electronic form to notify the Local Authority of a child who has become EHE.
- DVA Coordinators are seconded to the Early Help Hubs from Behind Closed Doors to support the facilitation of work with children who are the victims of DVA. Staff in the Early Help Hubs continue to deliver bespoke training sessions where there is a need and coordinators have a focus on mental health, substance use and domestic violence and abuse. In the coming months, the DVA Coordinators will be supporting colleagues to develop specific programmes of work for children affected by domestic violence and abuse. DVA Coordinators are going to prioritise supporting schools to deliver healthy relationship work which is suitable for Key Stage 1-4. This is being trialled within a primary school with a view to rolling out to other schools, clusters, youth service and any other interested partner agencies thereafter.
- It is important to note that the review highlighted that not all ‘clusters’ are equal when it comes to accessing domestic abuse support for children. This is an area that requires improvement as children and young people should not be disadvantaged due to not being in a Cluster arrangement.
- Child Protection Online Management System (CPOMS) is the electronic monitoring system used by education providers as a way of monitoring safeguarding, wellbeing, and pastoral issues. This system supports schools and further education settings to be automatically notified about domestic abuse incidents and reduces instances where the notification may be missed through the current telephone call system. This priority review identified this to be an area that requires improvement to improve the timeliness of information sharing and access for all. The task group have now undertaken reference meetings with other local authorities who have fully adopted this system to establish the merits of adopting CPOMS across all schools in Leeds. In addition, the local authority has held a workshop with DSLs in schools who access CPOMS daily and the feedback overall for the system has been very positive. The local authority with their I.T department will be presenting an options report for consideration in December 2022. During 2023 assurance will be required to understand the ‘take up’ of schools using CPOMS.
In addition, during 2020-21 the LSCP part funded a health post to sit in the Front Door Safeguarding Hub (FDSH) with part of the role being to support the daily domestic violence meetings and MARAC (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference) process and subsequently funded by the Leeds Health and Care Partnership (LHCP).
In April 2021 the LHCP raised with the Executive that domestic abuse incidents are increasing, therefore this is placing significant demands on the partnership resources within the MARAC. LHCP requested assurance that these demands are investigated and addressed. The Executive invited Safer Leeds to the Executive to highlight work undertaken to mitigate these demands, ensure that the FDSH is appropriately resourced while ensuring that families continue to be protected.
The presentation provided to the Executive describes a new model of triaging cases through a multi-agency approach called Daily Risk Assessment Management Meetings (DRAMM) The DRAMM is a daily meeting consisting of 3 key agencies, Children’s Social Care Services, West Yorkshire Police and Leeds Domestic Violence Service, who triage high risk police incidents and MARAC repeats. Any cases discussed in the DRAMM and assessed as high risk and in need of further discussion will be referred into the MARAC. The impact of this is fewer inappropriate referrals to the FDSH however, this work will require continued monitoring to ensure its effectiveness.
Priority Two: Vulnerable Learners
The LSCP Business Unit, Executive with the support of the Independent Chair, intend to lead on Priority Two during 2023, to seek assurance within the area of vulnerable learners, including areas of improvements and understanding the safeguarding systems partnership response to the most vulnerable learners.
This review will be scoped to seek views in relation to the areas for explorations, however, we aim to consider the following children and young people:
- Those who do not attend mainstream school,
- Children with special educational needs where there are also safeguarding concerns,
- Looked after children and Care Leavers
- Those educated at home who may have additional vulnerabilities
- Children missing from education
- Educational experiences for children from Gypsy and Roma Traveller backgrounds
Priority Three: Exploitation of Children and Young People
The below provides an account of how the LSCP continues to focus on children at risk of / experiencing exploitation. This remains an area that requires on-going work and monitoring with further opportunities to strengthen this work to the Serious Youth Violence Strategy.
The Multi-agency Child Exploitation (MACE) Framework describes Leeds arrangements when responding to the challenge of children vulnerable to exploitation, including child sexual exploitation (CSE), those children who go missing; and other forms of abuse such as child criminal exploitation (CCE). This framework has three specific multi-agency functions:
Bronze MACE-Child Focused: This multi-agency team which includes police, the Safe Project, health and third sector representatives meets every two weeks. Professionals can refer emerging cases of child exploitation and works with them to identify strategies to reduce risk. It will also consider cases where a Child Protection Plan is in place and the risks continue to escalate to identify more intense strategies to reduce risk. It also provides a sharp focus on disrupting perpetrators ensuring that they are managed appropriately. Information, advice, and guidance is provided to professionals bringing cases to this meeting as well as further background checks undertaken to identify possible links to other young people or adults already known to services.
Bronze MACE-Contextual: It was recognised that the Children Act is more aligned to abuse that happens in the family home or related to extended family / friendship circles and not a contextual perspective. This process is built on the idea that safety for a child is achieved through interventions with their families and their capacity to protect their children and not necessarily the contexts in which they have come to harm.
The MACE Contextual Meeting started in Leeds in August 2021 and gathered momentum in 2022 and meetings currently take place twice a month to look at bringing together data, information, and intelligence to support the disruption of exploitation and the protection of children. To date, there have been attendees from over 20 partners from across Leeds from a range of departments and organisations including CSWS, Police, Health, Education, Probation, Libraries, Youth Justice Service, Licensing, Parks & Countryside, and the Housing and Communities Teams. This group has identified 10 clusters where there are higher rates of known risk and has enabled a coordinated effort to disrupt causes of harm in those clusters. Businesses have been targeted with information on exploitation, police and community awareness have been heightened and a focus on gathering further intelligence in those areas have been encouraged. Furthermore. OfSTED in their 2022 visit observed a contextual meeting and stated in the report 'multi-agency approaches to identifying and disrupting exploitation are effective’.