What is a Child Safeguarding Practice Review?
Responsibility for safeguarding systems learning lessons from serious child safeguarding incidents now rests at a national level with the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, and at a local level with the three statutory safeguarding partners (Police, Health and the Local Authority). Local areas no longer conduct Serious Case Reviews, and instead consider whether to conduct a local child safeguarding practice review (CSPR).
A local child safeguarding practice review is a multi-agency case review, carried out by the Plymouth Safeguarding Children Partnership if there is a serious child safeguarding case. A serious child safeguarding case is defined by Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023 as a case in which abuse or neglect of a child is known or suspected, and the child has died or been seriously harmed.
The purpose of a Child Safeguarding Practice Review is to:
Identify how improvements can be made to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.
Seek to prevent or reduce the risk of recurrence of similar incidents.
Provide a way of
looking at and analysing frontline practice as well as organisational structures and learning.
Promote and share information about improvements, both
within the area and potentially beyond.
A Child Safeguarding Practice Review is not an investigation into how a child died or was seriously harmed. It is also completely separate from any investigation by the Police or the Coroner. It is an opportunity for the Partnership to work with all practitioners involved to understand if there is potential learning to prevent similar incidents happening in the future. They are not conducted to hold individuals, organisations, or agencies to account.
Local Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews
Reviews are about promoting and sharing information about improvements, both within Plymouth and potentially beyond, so safeguarding partners must publish the CSPR report. Published reports must be publicly available for at least one year. The NSPCC National case review repository holds copies of published reports, making it easier to access and share learning. This can be accessed HERE.
We realise that the CSPR reports are lengthy reports, so we have also created ‘Learning on a Page’ documents to highlight the child’s lived experience, key learning and learning into practice from each CSPR.
Serious Case Reviews
Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) were established under the Children Act HM Government, 2004 to review cases where a child has died and abuse or neglect is known or suspected. New arrangements were intoduced in 2018 to replace Serious Case Reviews with the CSPR process we use today.
Below are some of PSCP’s serious case reviews.
