Each district of Derbyshire has its own Safeguarding Children Management Team, which is responsible for promoting good practice and developing links in the area.
Each group is responsible for promoting activities to ensure that children in their area are kept safe. These activities may include training, public awareness raising and professional networking for those involved in work with children.
The following pages may also include information about community based activities in the various districts.
District Safeguarding Children Management Teams
District Safeguarding Children Management Teams are an integral part of the Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Board (DSCB) structure and play an important role in the board's responsibility to safeguard and promote the welfare of children across the county.
Seven District Safeguarding Children Management Teams are to be established which are to be co-terminus with the organisational structure of Derbyshire County Council's Children and Younger Adults (CAYA) department.
District Safeguarding Children Management Teams are expected to co-ordinate local work designed to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. This includes:
- operational and practice issues
- service delivery
- performance management and trends
- user satisfaction
- Staff perspectives
- local workforce planning
- dissemination of research
The work of District Safeguarding Children Management Teams will be fed into the Derbyshire Children's Trust.
At a local level, the chair of the District Safeguarding Children Management Team will be a member of the District Children and Young People's Partnership Group. They will regularly attend and contribute to this Partnership Group to ensure that the safeguarding work of the two groups is integrated.
Specific role and function
To ensure the effectiveness of local arrangements designed to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.
To help ensure that all children's workforce practitioners and managers within a specific district have a clear understanding of safeguarding children procedures, policies and requirements.
To identify multi-agency action where there are local concerns with regard to safeguarding children issues, including thresholds for intervention.
To assist with the identification of training needs and requirements across the children's workforce.
To co-operate with other district safeguarding groups and neighbouring local authorities to provide a consistent and effective safeguarding response to meet the needs of children.
To help monitor the effectiveness of safeguarding interventions and in particular to undertake audits of safeguarding issues as and when required by the Safeguarding Children Board.
To assist with the understanding and dissemination of the lessons learnt from local and national serious case reviews.
To promote information and awareness on safeguarding practice for all local practitioners across the children's workforce and the public in order to assist delivering the safeguarding strategy as directed by the Board. This will include commissioning up to two annual awareness raising events within the local area.
To provide a local annual development plan setting out clear objectives that support and are complementary to the Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Board Annual Business Plan. Such plans are to be agreed by the Board.
The Chair of the District Safeguarding Children Management Team is required to present a report to the Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Board twice annually with regard to progress achieved in meeting the Team's core requirements as set out by this paper.
Membership
The District Safeguarding Children Management Team will be chaired by the District Manager (Safeguarding and Specialist Services) unless alternative arrangements are agreed by the Board.
The team will appoint a vice-chair to serve for a minimum period of 12 months.
- The District Safeguarding Children Management Team will be comprised of a core multi-agency group with agreed representatives from:
- Derbyshire County Council Children and Younger Adults Department (including the appropriate Safeguarding Children Manager)
- Derbyshire Constabulary
- Health
- Connexions
- School Clusters
- District and Borough Councils
- Voluntary and Community Sector
- Mental Health Service.
The core group will invite other agencies and practitioners to attend as and when required. For example, Domestic Violence Co-ordinators, Youth Offending Team, etc.
The wider children's workforce across the statutory and voluntary sector within a given district will be encouraged by the core group to attend the awareness raising events.
The core group is mandated by the Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Board and regular attendance at the group is expected and will be audited and reported back into the board.
The Safeguarding Children Board will ensure that the core membership is comprised of staff/managers at appropriate levels of responsibility within their organisations to be able to fulfil the obligations and remit of the District Safeguarding Children Management Team.
The meetings are to take place bi-monthly. Meetings are to be appropriately minuted and copies of such to be fed into the Safeguarding Board.
Facilitation
Each group will be allocated an annual budget to facilitate meetings and in particular to promote the information raising events as required by their core function.
Administrative support will be through the district CAYA business service provision up to an equivalent of 4 hours per month, which will be funded by DSCB. The arrangement will be reviewed on an annual basis.
The Safeguarding Children Board will facilitate a meeting of chairs and vice-chairs of District Safeguarding Children Management Teams on a quarterly basis to identify areas of common concern in order to better inform the overall direction of the board's work and to facilitate the exchange of good practice.
An annual development day for the combined core membership of the District Safeguarding Children Management Teams will be provided by the Safeguarding Board to further develop good practice.
