Rise of investigations into children at risk of serious harm in Haringey

Haringey Safeguarding Children Partnership presented its annual report at a committee meeting last week, reports Grace Howarth, Local Democracy Reporter

Haringey Council’s children’s services department in Wood Green

The “effectiveness” of a group of public bodies tasked with safeguarding young people in Haringey was discussed by councillors amid a rise of investigations into children at risk of significant harm.

During a children and young people’s scrutiny panel on Thursday (4th) committee members discussed an annual report from the Haringey Safeguarding Children Partnership (HSCP) for 2022/23.

The report outlined the effectiveness of multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, focusing on the impact and difference made to children and young people.

HSCP, which began in 2019, consists of three main bodies; Haringey Council Metropolitan Police and the local NHS body, North Central London Integrated Care Board (ICB).

David Archibald, the independent chair and scrutineer on Haringey Safeguarding Children Board went through some of the partnership’s most recent performance data.

The number of children subjected to a Section 47 enquiry, an investigation to assess if a child is at risk of significant harm, increased 22% year on year. For 2022/23, for every 10,000 children, 218 had Section 47 enquiries compared with 196 in 2021/22.

The rate of looked after children dropped slightly year on year with 69 per 10,000 children being looked after as of March 2023, compared to 71 for 2021/22.

In March 2023 results showed there were 233 children subjected to child protection plans while the partnership recorded 178 at the end of 2022.

Across 2022 to 2023, 278 children started child protection plans and 222 ceased them.

David outlined the focus of 2022/23, which included children living with mental health issues and contextual safeguarding older children, which means responding to children’s experiences of significant harm beyond the family and home. One main risk is child exploitation.

Other areas of focus were transitional safeguarding, safeguarding young adults across developmental stages, and developing the system for managing the risk to children who go missing.

Mentioning highlights from the year, David said Haringey children’s social care grading of ‘good’ by Ofsted “helped the HSCP’s performance”. He highlighted the local authority designated officer, who is responsible for managing allegations against adults who work with children, for their “expertise and approachability” and deemed them a “credit to the council”.

Committee chair Makbule Gunes, a councillor for South Tottenham ward, asked whether the group was “confident” it could maintain good results.

David said the agencies worked “very well together” and they were “in a good place”. He added: “We don’t hit good and cruise at that altitude forever, there are always new challenges coming along and new learning and improvements to be made.”

He said contextual safeguarding of young people was one of the areas where they needed to “continue to learn”.

Committee member Sue Jameson, councillor for Bruce Castle ward, asked about the “pitfalls” of organising “lots of departments”.

David acknowledged the difficulties saying in audits and reviews for things that had “gone wrong” over the years, “information sharing” was “often raised as an area for improvement”.

He said: “It’s something we have continued to address in training and feedback, and dissemination of best practice.”

Tottenham ward councillor Matt White asked what the organisation was doing to improve areas where the borough “could be working better”.

David ticked off a list of approaches including an “emphasis” on training staff across agencies together to build the relationship between them. Using the performance data to “monitor” trends and “address problems” and extracting information from reviews and case file audits.

Lourdes Keever, a non-councillor committee member and church representative, said the report was “not accessible”. Summarising she said there was a “lack of clarity” within the report on the partnership’s “relationship to schools”. She also said it didn’t consider parents who don’t have English as a first language.

Lourdes said she’d been raising these issues at previous annual report meetings, adding she’d been told “a retired head teacher” would be “appointed to the partnership”, something she’d had no update on.

After some discussion, Cllr Gunes said the panel would make a recommendation, a motion that requires approval by council, that an “easily accessible version of this report” be sent to “governors, schools and everyone else”, so they could “benefit” from its information.

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