Safeguarding Partners foreword
Safeguarding Partners Foreword
We believe Hampshire Safeguarding Children Partnership supports mature and effective multi-agency safeguarding arrangements for Hampshire’s children. There is a clear focus on assurance and learning together. This is evidenced in the support and challenge across the partnership with senior leaders working to model the high support and high challenge we see and expect to see within and across our services.
We have seen positive engagement and commitment of relevant agencies in regular assurance and scrutiny activities, training and workforce development and learning from serious safeguarding cases. As safeguarding partners, we continue to work collaboratively to support and safeguard Hampshire’s children. Sustained demand across services and education settings continues with the significant impact of the cost of living crisis evident for children and families and the heavy impact of the challenging financial environment for all services, including statutory safeguarding organisations.
As a partnership, we have worked to provide support and guidance to our multi-agency practitioners through a range of mechanisms. We know our resources responding to the neglect of children are among those most accessed by practitioners across Hampshire and this year we have worked to review and refresh our Neglect Strategy and associated Toolkit to ensure children who are neglected are identified and responded to. This will be launched in 2024/25.
We align multi-agency auditing to our strategic priorities and as you watch and listen to this yearly report you will hear more about those important elements of our work.
We have valued the role of our independent chair and scrutineer who offers independent oversight, challenge and support to all the work of the partnership, critically supporting us as safeguarding partners to be equally engaged, accountable and to lead the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements for Hampshire. This is demonstrated through decision making and assurance sought by us as safeguarding partners which again you will see throughout this report.
During this reporting period we have undertaken benchmarking of our multi-agency safeguarding arrangements in response to the new iteration of Working Together to Safeguard Children. This included a strategic briefing for the lead safeguarding partners to appraise them of their responsibilities and accountabilities. We have an implementation plan in place to meet the new requirements.
We take our responsibilities as safeguarding partners seriously and work to continuously improve our multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. Ours continues to be a learning partnership based on respectful challenge and mutual support.
Hampshire County Council
Stuart Ashley
Director of Children’s Services
Steph How
Deputy Director, Children and Families
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary
Amanda Horsburgh
Superintendent (until June 2023)
Karen McManus
Head of Public Protection
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board
Katherine Elsmore
Associate Director of Safeguarding (until Nov 23)
Julie Hulls
Senior Designated Nurse for Safeguarding Children and Looked After Children/Interim Associate Director of Safeguarding, Children and Looked After Children