News:    17 January 2025

Publication of the Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has been published and introduced to Parliament at its first reading. The Bill aims to change the law to better protect children and raise standards in education in England. Measures proposed in the Bill include:

• the introduction of registers in every local authority in England to identify children who are not in school;
• a system of unique identifier numbers for children across services to assist information and data sharing;
• strengthening the role of education professionals in safeguarding;
• greater support for families to stay together, including access to Family group decision-making meetings for all families with children at risk of entering the care system; and
• stronger regulation of children’s social care providers.
• Additionally, parents will no longer have an automatic right to educate their children at home if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan. The DfE has published policy summary notes on measures in the Bill.

The  Bill can be accessed via the link below:

• Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – UK Parliament

The Department for Education (DfE) has published some helpful policy summary notes to accompany the Bill:

• Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – Policy Summary Notes, DfE, December 2024

Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel Annual Report 

NSPCC Learning has published a CASPAR briefing summarising the recently published Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s Annual Report (2023 – 2024), which looked at the child safeguarding system in England, based on serious child safeguarding incidents occurring between April 2023 and March 2024. The CASPAR briefing summarises: the context and challenges in the safeguarding and child protection system; data from rapid reviews; spotlight themes and learning for practice; and plans for the Panel’s future work

Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements (MASA)

The new MASA for Redbridge are available to download via the link below:

• Redbridge SCP MASA Statement December 2024 (PDF 786KB)

These are accompanied by a Vision and Values Statement:

• RSCP Statement of Vision and Values – December 2024 (PDF 144KB)

Fire Safety eLearning Toolkit

Sutton Local Safeguarding Children Partnership (LSCP) and Safeguarding Adults Board (SAB) have kindly allowed open access to their published Fire Safety eLearning Toolkit.  Please see link below:

• Fire Prevention and Safeguarding Toolkit

Children’s Social Care Reform

The Department for Education (DfE) published on 18 November 2024 a policy statement outlining the Government’s commitment to reforming the children’s social care system in England. The report sets out reforms aiming to help keep families together and children safe, such as offering family group decision making to all families and introducing measures to strengthen multi-agency child protection, including plans for greater involvement of the education sector. It also outlines reforms to make the care system child-centred and to tackle profiteering amongst placement providers through greater regulation, transparency and caps placed on profits. Other proposals include enhanced support for kinship carers, foster carers and families with children who have disabilities; additional support for care leavers up to the age of 25; and the introduction of a Single Unique Identifier for children to help improve multi-agency information sharing.

• DfE Keeping children safe, helping families thrive – Policy Statement, November 2024

Redbridge ‘One Panel’ – change of E-mail Address

As of 21 October, the ‘One Panel’ email address has changed, and the old mailbox, hosted by the Local Authority has now been closed.  Please send any referrals, queries or scoping forms to nelondonicb.onepanelredbridge@nhs.net .

RSCP Training Programme 2024 – 2025

Our  RSCP Training Programme for 2024/25is available to all working or volunteering with children and families in the Redbridge area.  There are over 70 sessions are grouped into three series, key to your work with children and families :

• Understanding Safeguarding Risks
• Contextual Safeguarding & Child on Child Abuse
• Creating Safer Settings for Children and Families

We hope you find something here for your continued professional development.

New sessions this year include:

• Modern Slavery (FREE BRIEFING)
• Intrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse – An Introduction
• ‘Think Family’: Safeguarding the Whole Family (FREE BRIEFING)
• Understanding Unconscious Bias
• Safer Recruitment (Refresher Training)

To book your place on any of the courses, please use our online booking form.  You will see there are some courses that have ‘dates and times TBC’; please don’t try and book a place on those yet – we just want you to know they’re in the pipeline for this year!  For notes on training fees and cancellation policy, please click here and visit our website for full details of our training programme.  If you’ve received this email from someone else and you’d like to sign up to our mailing list, you can do so using our contact form.

Prevent Training Sessions

Connect Futures are offering a  free ‘virtual’ learning event – Challenging Extremism & Hate – Train the Trainer (see below):

• Tuesday 28 January 2025 – 13:00 – 16:00 –   Eventbrite    –     Teams