P6 m3
Sources of information and support for children who
have suffered abuse
Every
child
matters
agenda
“Child protection cannot be separated from policies to
improve children’s lives as a whole.”
Five outcomes underpin the government’s strategy





being healthy
staying safe
enjoying and achieving
making a positive contribution
economic wellbeing
Early years workers have an important role to play in helping to deliver
these outcomes
Multi-agency working
 Every child matters green paper called for better
information sharing between agencies to support
children and their families who have been abused and
to prevent abuse.
 Childcare practitioners have much involvement with
children. They can provide social workers and other
agencies with vital information about the child such
as, the child`s development, health, family
relationships.
 Under Every Child Matters, the comment assessment
framework was developed. This framework is used by
professionals to assess children`s needs.
 In early years setting it is important that relationship
with other professionals is collaborative. Working well
together will be positive for the child.
 Settings must ensure they welcome other
professionals, observe and monitor children regularly,
have good record keeping and staff are trained in
safeguarding children.
 Maintain confidentiality
 Information given to other professional is need to
complete their part of the care plan for the child.
 Under the Children Act, Social Services are duty
bound to provide services to children and families in
need. These services may include
 Advice
 Counselling
 Day care for younger children
 Home help
 Accommodation.
 What are the benefits of multi-agency working?
Features of effective partnership
working
 Providing a more effective service.
 Enabling professionals and lay people to achieve their objectives more
fully and economically.
 Consider assessment of the needs of an individual service user.
 Establish each person’s roles and responsibilities, set objectives and
outcomes for meetings.
 Have clear direction.
 Agree ways of communicating i.e. written, verbal by email, letter or
telephone.
 Agree frequency of meetings.
 Respect professional boundaries.
 Know limitation and respect professional expertise.
 Keep to agreements.
Voluntary organisations
 Name some voluntary organisations that can support
children and their families?
Voluntary organisations
 There are many voluntary organisation that support
children and families. Support that can be provided
includes. Play therapy, counselling, advice,
accommodation, support mentors for children and
parents, behaviour therapy.
 Action For Children
 Women`s Aid (Calan)
 NSPCC
 Barnado`s
 Parent line
 Child line
 The Samaritans
 Kidscape
 All the above can offer support services to children and
families
Lead Professionals
 Who are lead professional in supporting children and
their families?
Lead Professionals
 Health visitors- will support the family from when the
child is born. Health visitors may also have contact
with settings to ensure children are developing.
 Psychiatrists- May be working with family if there are
mental health issues
 GP`s- Doctors can refer children or families to
counselling, CAMS, reassure ongoing support and
make referrals to relevant services
 Religious ministers- can offer emotional support to
children and their families. Can refer to other services
dif concerned for child or family.
 Educational psychologists- Can support a child if there
are behaviour or development issues, or if child had
been abused.
 Family workers are often attached to children`s centres
or voluntary organisations, will support the family.
Attend child protection meetings.
 CAFCASS Cymru- will support a child who is going
through the legal system. Will assess the child and give
recommendations to the court of best possible action.
 Teachers- schools are one of the lead professionals who can report all
concerns. Teachers are often very aware of the children`s needs
behaviour and problems.
 Drug and alcohol counsellors- can support parents who misuse
substances
 Early years development and child care partnership
 Each Local Authority has responsibility for the provision of:
 Information and advice about child minding and day care primarily
through the Children's Information Service;
 Training should include child protection training for persons who
provide or assist in providing child minding or day care.
 The above responsibilities should be discharged in cooperation with
the Early Years Development and Child Care Partnership on which
relevant services within the county will be represented.
 The duty of local authorities, schools of all kinds and
FE colleges to have arrangements for carrying out their
functions with a view to safeguarding & promoting the
welfare of children is under sections 175 & 157 of the
Education Act 2002.
 Education staff have a crucial role to play in helping
identify welfare concerns and indicators of possible
abuse or neglect at an early stage.
 The local authority has a nominated a lead officer with
responsibly for safeguarding and promoting the
welfare of all children at three levels. These
responsibilities are:
 Strategic - coordinating and planning service delivery;
 Support - ensuring schools are aware of their
responsibilities, monitoring their performance and
ensuring training, model policies and procedures and
advice and support is available;
 Operational - taking responsibility for safeguarding
children who are excluded from school or who have
not obtained a school place, for example children and
pupil referral units or being educated by the
authority's home tutor service; involvement in dealing
with allegations against staff and volunteers; and
ensuring arrangements are in place to prevent
unsuitable staff and volunteers from working with
children
Police
 The Police have a general responsibility for the protection




of life and limb as well as the prevention and detection of
crime. The Police's involvement in cases of child protection
stems from these responsibilities.
The Police focus is to determine whether a criminal offence
has been committed, to identify the offender/s and to
secure the best possible evidence for criminal proceedings.
The priorities of the Police in relation to safeguarding
children are:
To protect the lives of children and ensure that in the
policing of child abuse the welfare of the child is
paramount;
To investigate all reports of child abuse and neglect and to
protect the rights of child victims of crime;
 To establish investigating child abuse and safeguarding
children as a mainstream policing activity;
 To take effective action against offenders so that they can
be held accountable through the criminal justice system,
whilst safeguarding the welfare of the child;
 To adopt a proactive multi agency approach to safeguarding
and in preventing and reducing child abuse and neglect.
 All Police Officers and Staff (including response officers,
Safer Neighbourhood Teams and CID) must, if they
conclude a child may be at risk of significant harm, take
immediate action to ensure the safety and welfare of the
child. Where required, they must take emergency
protective action which may include taking the child into
Police Protection under S.46 The Children Act 1989.
Social workers
 The Director of Children’s Services, under section 18 of the
Children Act 2004 has responsibility for ensuring that a local
authority meets their specific duties to organise and plan
services and to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.
Each local authority is responsible for establishing a Local
Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) in their area and ensuring
it is run effectively. An LSCB can cover more than one local
authority area.
Social workers take a lead role in:
 responding to children and families in need of support and help
 undertaking enquiries following allegations or suspicion of
abuse
 undertaking initial assessments and core assessments as part of
the Assessment Framework
 convening strategy meetings and initial and subsequent





child-protection conferences
court action to safeguard and protect children
coordinating the implementation of the child protection
plan for children on the child protection register
looking after and planning for children in the care of the
council
ensuring that looked-after children are safeguarded in a
foster family, children's home or other placement.
http://www.education.gov.uk/childrenandyoungpeople/saf
eguardingchildren/a0010818/child-protection-role-of-lachildrens-social-care
Play therapy
 What is Play Therapy?
 Play Therapy helps children understand muddled
feelings and upsetting events that they haven't had the
chance to sort out properly. Rather than having to
explain what is troubling them, as adult therapy
usually expects, children use play to communicate at
their own level and at their own pace, without feeling
interrogated or threatened.
How can Play Therapy help a child?
 Play is vital to every child's social, emotional, cognitive, physical,
creative and language development. It helps make learning
concrete for all children and young people including those for
whom verbal communication may be difficult.
 Play Therapy helps children in a variety of ways. Children receive
emotional support and can learn to understand more about their
own feelings and thoughts. Sometimes they may re-enact or play
out traumatic or difficult life experiences in order to make sense
of their past and cope better with their future. Children may also
learn to manage relationships and conflicts in more appropriate
ways.
 The outcomes of Play Therapy may be general e.g. a reduction in
anxiety and raised self-esteem, or more specific such as a change
in behaviour and improved relations with family and friends.
Play therapy
 <iframe width="560" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6RkdZDf1jLY"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 <iframe width="420" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Zxxgfn5ebfM"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Children`s centres
 Integrated Children's Centres
 What is an Integrated Children's Centre?
 Integrated Children's Centres (ICC's) are based on the






concept that providing integrated education, care, family
support and health services is a key factor in determining
good outcomes for children and their parents, ensuring the
best start in life.
Each ICC centre will have at its core:
Early Years Education
Childcare
Open Access Play
Community Education and Training
(http://www.childreninwales.org.uk/inyourarea/integchild
centres/index.html)
 Flying Start is the Welsh Government targeted Early
Years programme for families with children under 4
years of age in some of the most deprived areas of
Wales.
 Flying Start is one of the Welsh Government’s top
priorities.
 We are committed to doubling the number of children
and their families benefiting from the Flying Start
programme from 18,000 to 36,000. To support, an
additional £55 million funding has been made
available over the course of the next three years.
 What Flying Start means in practice
 The core elements of the programme are drawn from a






range of options that have been shown to influence positive
outcomes for children and their families. These include:
Free quality, part-time childcare for 2-3 year olds.
An enhanced Health Visiting service.
Access to Parenting Programmes.
Early Language Development.
This programme is universally available to all eligible
children and their families in the areas in which it runs.
If you want to know more about Flying Start in your area
please contact the Flying Start Co-ordinator at your local
authority.

Flying Start projects help children get the best start in life. Offering a
broad range of services under one roof, they improve children's
outcomes in preparation for school and in the long term.
 Early education and intervention
 Our staff are there from the first years of a child's life. They make sure
that children have the opportunity to learn, develop and play. By
maximising children's early learning opportunities, we help improve
their ability to learn and their readiness for school. By being there from
the beginning, our staff can identify and respond to any additional
needs that a child may have.
Health services
 Supporting families to look after the health of their children is
important to us. Promoting healthy lifestyles and child development
before and after birth is a big part of this. By working in partnership
with primary and community healthcare, we can make sure all children
receive the early healthcare support they need.
 Parenting services
 Our parenting programmes help parents to understand
and cope with their children's needs. Through these and
our general parenting services, parents have access to
information and an opportunity to explore how to best
nurture their children. Working in partnership with other
agencies also allows us adopt a whole-family approach. So
all of the parents' needs can be met by the best
professionals.
We're dedicated to helping parents access adult education
and learning resources in the community. And we
encourage them to explore training, employment or
volunteering opportunities, wherever possible. All this,
plus a range of drop-in advice and support services, means
we can really meet the broad range of parents' needs.
 Families with more complex needs
 For families in more complex situations we offer
effective, problem-solving interventions. We use oneto-one and group work, and tailored packages of
psychological support to build resilience and improve
family attachments and reduce family breakdown.
We open pathways to support services to alleviate
external stresses such as housing and work closely
with partners to ensure all the needs of each member
of the family are met.
Alternative forms of care
 LOOKED-AFTER CHILDREN
 Children become "looked-after" by local authorities if they
are subject to a care order. A child may be "looked-after" by
the local authority, but may still be living with their parents
(under the terms of the care plan). Children may also be
looked-after under section 20 of The Children Act 1989 .
This means children are accommodated with the
permission of their parents, which may be because the
parents are unable to cope, or short-term respite care for
children with disabilities or long-term care for
unaccompanied asylum seeking children.
 Foster care can be used for short or long term




placements.
It enables children who have been abused to
experience normal family life.
If a child is fostered it is usual that they will still
attend their day care or school until a permanent place
is found or they can return to their parents.
Respite care is similar to fostering but children will go
for short periods of time to “time out” or to support the
parents
Adoption is another alternative, in cases of adoption
the birth parents lose parental responsibility to the
adoptive parents.
Working with parents and families
 Handout or page 201 of btec book.
 The majority of professionals know that their organisation
has a child protection policy
 40% of these however are only broadly familiar with it or
not familiar at all
 (NSPCC, statistics power point, 2011)