This review focuses on what happened to a number of children placed at three independently provided specialist residential facilities for disabled children - Fullerton House, Wheatley House and Wilsic Hall. Allegations of harm to children living in these three privately run residential facilities, located in Doncaster and operated by the Hesley Group, came to light in March 2021.
 
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel lead for this review is Dr Susan Tranter. Dame Christine Lenehan, Director of the Council for Disabled Children at the National Children’s Bureau, is conducting the review on behalf of the Panel.
 
If you have any questions, please direct all correspondence to Mailbox.NationalReviewPanel@education.gov.uk

Last year the Panel assigned its members to each of the nine English regions. We established this role to facilitate strategic engagement with safeguarding partners and to support dialogue about general or specific issues relating to child safeguarding practice at a local level, including sometimes contributing to local partnership or regional events.
 
Panel regional links are now as follows:
 
• North West – Jenny Coles
• North East – Dale Simon
• Yorkshire and the Humber – Annie Hudson
• West Midlands – Peter Sidebotham
• East Midlands – Peter Sidebotham
• East of England – Susan Tranter
• South West – Sarah Elliott
• South East – Dale Simon
• London – Renuka Jeyarajah-Dent and Jahnine Davis
 
The series of virtual roundtables we convened in the autumn across each of the regions were invaluable in promoting dialogue and good conversation about a range of issues of mutual interest and concern.  A summary of the key themes from these roundtables can be found here. We hope to convene a further series of events later this year and will be in touch with more information in the coming months.
 

The Panel is looking to recruit a new member from the health sector with a nursing profession background.
 
The right candidate will be someone who can bring knowledge and experience of working strategically and of child protection practice.  They must have a strong understanding of the multi-agency child safeguarding system.
 
The closing date for applications is Monday 18^th April 2022. Please see this link for more information: https://bit.ly/CSPRP-Health

To help develop our understanding of what works best for LCSPRs, the Panel has commissioned the University of East Anglia and the University of Birmingham to carry out new research. The aim is to improve our understanding of local learning systems to see how the learning from rapid reviews and LCSPRs is being implemented.

We believe that it is vital to promote and support high quality learning from LCSPRs if we are all to have a positive impact on practice and, therefore, on the lives of children and families. The new LCSPR system is evolving and developing to the very different requirements and expectations compared to the ‘old’ SCR approach. The Panel wants to support safeguarding partners to build on current practice and maximise the benefit and opportunities for good and timely learning. 

We have found that, if safeguarding partnerships undertake a strong and effective rapid review, then firstly, they may not need to do an LCSPR, and secondly, if they do one, it will be a better-focused LCSPR delivering positive change and improvement. However, the Panel is still seeing too many rapid reviews which are not focussed on the key issues, are overly long, are descriptive rather than analytical and so are much less likely to support learning and improvement.

It is important that rapid reviews:

·      Always set out a very clear rationale for doing an LCSPR and what value it will add to the rapid review. It should be clear and explicit about the key questions and lines of enquiry that the LCSPR would seek to answer.

·      Make the connection between the findings in a rapid review and what needs to be explored further in an LCSPR.

We believe that it is important that safeguarding partnerships routinely consider the wider systemic issues when undertaking reviews, rather than limiting their focus to the particular issues of each case. This wider system learning should also encompass consideration of the impact of leadership and organisational culture on practice. We would also recommend that in their yearly report, safeguarding partnerships detail the learning they have taken forward from their LCSPRs and share their evaluations of the impact of that learning on practice.

The Panel will continue to share what we believe are key messages about LCSPRs to support more consistent quality through this newsletter, our annual report and panel guidance, whilst also recognising that different situations require different LCSPR approaches. In addition to this, the University of East Anglia and the University of Birmingham work is also looking at the different models and methodologies available for doing LCSPRs.

We will use the feedback and discussions from this commissioned research and from roundtables with safeguarding partnerships to help develop and refine approaches to LCSPRs so that they can deliver the practice and system changes we all want to see.

These LCSPRs were published between 1st December 2021 and 28th February 2022.

• London: Hackney, Child R.
• South-East: Luton, Oliwer; Milton Keynes, Child K; Surrey, Family B.
• North-West: St Helens, Child G; Warrington, Melody.
• West Midlands: Dudley, Child Y; Sandwell, Child YS; Sandwell, Child RS.
• North-East: Hartlepool and Stockton-on-Tees, Child O.

Thematic reviews:

• Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset: Thematic review of cross-border peer-on-peer abuse and CCE.
• Herefordshire: Thematic review into peer-on-peer abuse.
• Cheshire West and Chester: Thematic review into non-accidental injuries to children under 1 year.
• Swindon: Thematic review into babies with injuries.

Click here to access the NSPCC repository: https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/case-reviews
 
Click here to sign up for the monthly NSPCC briefing: https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/newsletter/case-reviews-update

 

The Strengthening Families, Protecting Children Programme is hosting a national online learning event on 14th and 15th June 2022. Over the two days, you can choose to attend sessions about the three Strengthening Families models and their effectiveness: Hertfordshire's 'Family Safeguarding', North Yorkshire's 'No Wrong Door' and Leeds' 'Family Valued'. For further details or to book a space, click here.