Barnardo’s outlines blueprint for child-friendly court system

Reforming the justice system in order to improve the way sexually abused children are treated in courts should be a priority for the new Lord Chief Justice, says Barnardo’s.

The children’s charity is urging the Rt Hon Sir John Thomas, who began his tenure as head of the judiciary in England and Wales on Tuesday, to introduce a set of four measures that the charity believes will improve the confidence of vulnerable children called to give evidence in legal hearings.

The charity wants all judges who preside over child sex abuse or exploitation cases to receive training in child protection and safeguarding, and for courts to hold “ground-rules hearings” before every case that involves young victims of sexual abuse to establish how child witnesses will be treated by the court.

Barnardo’s wants judges who sit on child sex cases to receive specialist training on the nature of child sexual exploitation and the impact the offence has on the behaviour of victims. The charity says this will equip them with the knowledge required to ensure that the defence does not use the child’s behaviour to discredit their evidence during cross-examination.

The charity also wants a set of special safeguarding measures to be used as a matter of course in all trials with child witnesses, with children being allowed to decide which of these measures they want implemented at any point before and during the trial.

Alison Worlsey, the charity’s deputy director, said: “It takes immense bravery for sexually exploited children to seek to prosecute their abusers and convictions play a vital role in enshrining confidence in the legal system.

“If we are to turn the tide in the fight against these awful crimes it is vital that victims feel they will be taken seriously and dealt with sensitively at all levels of the justice system.

“We urge the new Lord Chief Justice to prioritise reforms that will create a legal system that places justice for sexually exploited children at its very heart.”

Source: CYPNow

Professionals ‘collectively failed’ to protect Keanu Williams

A two-year-old boy from Birmingham was beaten to death by his mother after professionals “missed a significant number of opportunities” to intervene, a report has found.

Keanu Williams was found with 37 injuries sustained over a period of days after paramedics were called to a house in Birmingham in January 2011. He died later that night.

Rebecca Shuttleworth was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of his murder in June.

A serious case review (SCR) by Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board (SCB) found that social workers and health professionals “collectively failed” to prevent Keanu’s death.

The different agencies became “sidetracked” and failed to meet the standards of basic good practice when they should have reported their concerns, the SCR finds.

The report states that while Keanu’s death could not have been “predicted”, he was “likely” to suffer significant harm.

It notes that Keanu should have been made subject of a child protection plan on “at least two occasions” to address “issues of neglect and physical harm”. This included when Shuttleworth sought medical treatment for Keanu for what she described as “bumps and falls due to unsteadiness”, and when receiving treatment for a burn to his foot.

Despite Shuttleworth claiming the burn was caused “accidentally by a hot radiator” a Health Overview Report, based on medical evidence, concluded her explanation was not credible.

Four days before his death in January 2011, nursery staff saw “a number of marks and bruises” on Keanu’s body and thought he was “distressed” but they believed Shuttleworth’s explanations and decided to not press the issue any further.

The SCR found “a lack of focus on children and their welfare” by professionals, and criticises “poor communications between and within agencies”. A lack of confidence among professionals in challenging parents and shortcomings in recording systems and practice were also noted.

The report makes eight recommendations for changes to current practice, procedures and training, including that agencies involved in the case review their procedures for “challenge, internal and external disagreement, and escalation and whistleblowing”.

A further recommendation states that Birmingham SCB undertake a full review of the functioning of its frontline core child protection service to ensure that it focuses on the “child’s journey”.

Jane Held, chair of Birmingham SCB, apologised for “totally unacceptable and unnecessary failures” and promised to learn from Keanu’s case.

She said: “It’s not sufficient to say we will learn the lessons. Keanu died in 2011 but we know many children are still not safe enough in Birmingham. We owe it to Keanu and his extended family to redouble our efforts and actually change practice in every agency and service that had contact with him.

“There are no quick fixes and it requires collective effort by all partners to create the workforce we need with the right practice skills and enough capacity to do the job well.

“We have already taken action in a range of ways. However, now we need to achieve radical change by listening to children and young people and by working closely with the staff that do the job every day.

“We need to create the right conditions to support all our staff to put their responsibilities to safeguard children and promote their welfare first and foremost.”

Peter Hay, acting strategic director of children, young people and families at Birmingham City Council, added: “Today’s report into the tragic death of Keanu Williams is a further blight upon this city’s reputation, as we have failed to meet the basic expectation that our children are safe. For this we are unequivocally sorry.

“We accept too, that given our record in failing to improve children’s services that our apology may ring hollow and any assurance of lessons learned or other such statement is meaningless. We therefore want today’s report, into a death two years ago, to be the point of real change in children’s services.

“The city council fully supports the statement made by the safeguarding board: we will play our part in the action plan and be held to account accordingly.

“We know that we have to address how the council will make more of a difference to the safety of children in this city, which has been inadequate in its Ofsted rating since 2009. Following the changes we made to leadership of the service in June 2013, we know more about what needs to be different in the work done to protect children.”

Source: CYPNow

Northern Ireland’s health minister Edwin Poots has announced an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation. The BBC reports that the announcement follows the arrests of more than 30 people as part of a major child sex abuse investigation. However, the NSPCC has said Poots should focus on providing “immediate help” for victims of sexual exploitation, rather than on an inquiry.

Source: CYPNow

The NSPCC will publish serious case review (SCR) reports on its website from October. The decision to publish SCRs is the result of an agreement between the charity and the Association of Independent LSCB Chairs. Karen Childs Smith, head of knowledge and information at NSPCC, said lessons need to be learnt from SCRs, which tend to “raise the same issues over and over again”, and that publishing them in an easily accessible central location is the solution.

Source: CYPNow

The Department for Education has revealed that 3,980 children in care were adopted between April 2012 and March 2013. The annual Looked After Children Statistical First Release, published today, shows an increase of 15 per cent on the previous year, when 3,470 children were adopted. The figures also show that the number of children fostered rose two per cent over the same period.

Health watchdog announces launch of targeted child protection inspections

he Care Quality Commission (CQC) is to launch a dedicated child protection inspection regime of health services in England next week

The two-year project will target health services in 110 council areas where CQC research has shown children are at greatest risk.

Factors taken into account include child protection concerns highlighted in latest inspection reports, serious case review findings and the length of time since services were last inspected.

Areas likely to come under scrutiny first include the 20 authorities that have been judged to be failing by Ofsted over the past few years, including Birmingham, Doncaster and Sandwell.

The health watchdog will also target areas based on whistle-blowing information from NHS staff.

Services being looked at include GP surgeries, health visiting, school nurses, hospital emergency departments, maternity services and mental health services.  According to a CQC statement “the focus is on the child’s journey through this maze”.

The inspections will also focus on how well local health services are working together to safeguard children. A lack of information sharing and communication across services that support children is a key factor highlighted in serious case reviews and in Professor Eileen Munro’s 2011 review of child protection.

Other factors being considered by inspectors include how “safe, effective, caring, well-led and responsive to children’s needs” services are, the CQC statement adds.

A particular focus will be on how health services are supporting children in care.

The quality of child protection training and the timeliness of referrals to services such as mental health and substance abuse are among other issues inspectors will look at.

A specific issue the CQC will examine in hospitals and other acute care settings is whether they have alert systems in place to identify and track children who are at risk of harm.

This latest move by the CQC comes ahead of plans in 2015 for a multi-agency inspection of child protection across health, social care, education and the justice system that will involve Ofsted, CQC, HMI Probation, HMI Prisons and HMI Constabulary. Ofsted is to launch a consultation on the move next year.

CQC head of operational improvement Sue McMillan, said: “CQC and other inspectorates are working together to start a joint inspection programme in 2015. In the meantime, we are continuing to follow up our responsibilities in making sure children using health services are safeguarded from abuse and that children in the care of local authorities have their health needs met.”

The CQC previously inspected child protection jointly with Ofsted.

Rather than an Ofsted-style rating, CQC inspectors will make recommendations for improvement that will require a response from the service. There will also be a national report at the end of the first and second years of inspections.

The announcement comes just a day after Ofsted unveiled its new single inspection framework for local authority children’s social care services.

Source: CYPNow

Ofsted unveils inspection framework for children’s services

Ofsted is to push ahead with the introduction of a tougher inspection regime for children’s services, ignoring warnings from the sector that the system is too simplistic and will fail to deliver improvements.

The regulator’s new inspection framework for children’s services, published today, will start being used from November to assess the quality of all local authority services for vulnerable children, including those in a care placement, at risk of harm, care leavers up to 25 years old and those not in the education system.

The framework will use a standard four-point scale – outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate – used by Ofsted to grade services in the education and early years sectors to score the overall quality of children’s social care services.

A department’s performance and grade in three key service areas – the experiences and progress of children who need help and protection; the experiences and progress of children who are looked after (including adoption and care leavers); and leadership, management and governance – will be used to set the overall score.

If a local authority is judged “inadequate” in any of the three key areas, it will automatically be judged “inadequate” overall.

Debbie Jones, Ofsted national director for social care, said the new framework has children and young people and the quality of professional practice at its heart, and captures the “journey” of the young person through the care system.

She said: “It is our ambition to establish ‘good’ as the new minimum and for this to become the agreed standard for all services for children and young people. It is right to introduce the harder test asking what difference we are all making and I am impressed with the extent to which the new framework sets this out.”

But Andrew Webb, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), said he “fundamentally disagreed” with the use of graded judgments.

“Graded judgments can and do hide a multitude of strengths and weaknesses, and there is no certainty that two local authorities with the same judgments are providing the same quality of service and achieving the same outcomes for children in their area,” he said.

Webb added that using narrative judgments, setting out more detail on what was working well and needed to be improved, would have created a more transparent regulation system and enabled progress to be more clearly tracked.

The Local Government Association and Society of Local Authority Chief Executives said they stood by their previous criticism that the framework would produce “unrepresentative judgments of authorities’ performance”.

All 152 local authorities in England will be inspected under the new framework over the next three years, with those judged as “inadequate” facing re-inspection within 12 to 18 months.

Ofsted plans to consult widely next year on the development of a multi-agency inspection regime that evaluates and judges the contribution of health, police, probation and prison services in the help, care and protection of children and young people, and which is set to be introduced in 2015.

Source: CYPNow

Experts warn against witch hunt of male child carers

Childcare experts have urged early years practitioners to not focus on gender when learning lessons from the Little Stars Nursery child abuse case.

The call comes after a serious case review published this week highlighted evidence that staff at the now-closed Birmingham nursery were reluctant to challenge Paul Wilson, who used his position as an assistant at the setting to rape a child, “in case this was seen to be discriminatory”.

Although the review did not suggest Wilson’s gender was a factor in his crimes, Richard Harty, the programme leader for early childhood studies at the University of East London, said the case revealed problems with “policy and procedure at all levels rather than individuals and gender”.

“The worst thing that can happen from this would be a witch hunt about men and pedophilia,” he said.

“The witch hunt should be on the other side – why did Ofsted not investigate concerns? There’s been a real failure of safeguarding here.

“Safeguarding agencies need to speak to each other and we need to have good systems in place.”

Harty’s call was echoed by London Early Years Foundation chief executive June O’Sullivan.

“This is a time when we have to be responsible and sensible. This is not about men – it’s about systems,” she said.

O’Sullivan plans to review processes at the foundation’s 24 nurseries as a result of the case, which will look at HR procedures, mobile phone policies and social media regulations among other matters.

She suggested that Ofsted, which the serious case review found had failed to properly investigate concerns at Little Stars Nursery, might react to the report too forcefully.

“I suspect Ofsted will come in all guns blazing and get heavy,” she said. “I wonder if it would pick on nurseries where there are men as a starting point – but I don’t think it would be that focused.”

Laura Henry, director of Childcare Consultancy, said early years practitioners must avoid “knee-jerk reactions”.

“The clear message should be that these issues are not gender-specific

“In the Birmingham case, the problems quite clearly seemed to be around attitudes and behaviour.

“As a result, we should have intelligent conversations and be more solution-driven about what we can do in the sector to prevent this happening again.”

Henry said the Department for Education should lead an initiative to promote strong leadership in early years settings and consider how organisational culture could be defined and measured.

She also highlighted the 2009 Plymouth child abuse case involving female nursery worker Vanessa George, who was found guilty of sexual assault and making and distributing indecent pictures of children, to counter claims males always perpetrated such abuse.

In November 2012, the London Early Years Foundation published research to coincide with the launch of the London Network for Men in Childcare that showed men are deterred from working in childcare because they worry they will be perceived as being a paedophile.

Source: CYPNow