In 2016 a review of national safeguarding arrangements was carried out (the Wood Review 2016) which highlighted insufficient collaboration between agencies. This led to the Children and Social Work Act (2017) which gave responsibility for the effective implementation of local safeguarding children arrangements to three agencies: the Local Authority, Police and NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups. In the updated Working Together to Safeguard Children (2018) guidance, local areas were required to publish their new “local arrangements” which had to be implemented by September 2019.
Active Surrey are now represented on the new Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (as one of many “relevant agencies” in addition to the three statutory partners). Our role in this new body will be to represent the diverse range of organisations across voluntary sector and private sector delivering sport and physical activity to children and young people in Surrey.
The involvement of Active Surrey in the new arrangements has come as a result of sustained work in safeguarding in sport/physical activity over a number of years which has included:
- organising ongoing safeguarding training for around 400 clubs, coaches and sports providers each year;
- working in partnership with Surrey Safeguarding Children’s Board (the former governance set-up), Surrey Police, National Governing Bodies of Sport and local Borough/District Councils to deliver free training and learning to volunteer welfare officers in Surrey’s sports clubs;
- providing bespoke safeguarding training for Surrey’s leisure centre staff;
- supporting the roll out of Surrey Police’s SportSafe campaign;
- providing advice and support to sports clubs and physical activity providers on any safeguarding issues or concerns.
Through our representation on the Partnership, Active Surrey will increase awareness amongst safeguarding professionals of the huge network of paid workers and volunteers delivering sport and physical activity, and the support that these people need in order to ensure they can continue delivering activity as safely as possible. This will include:
- cascading training on relevant topics to our networks of sport and physical activity providers – for example contextual safeguarding, criminal exploitation and knife violence;
- raising awareness of thresholds for referral to the Children’s Single Point of Access (C-SPA);
- seeking input from voluntary and statutory physical activity partners into audits of provision to children and young people;
- raising awareness amongst sport and physical activity providers on relevant Safeguarding Partnership priorities and campaigns, such as neglect, additional vulnerabilities of children with SEND and domestic abuse; and cascading any relevant learning from serious case reviews to voluntary and statutory partners.
- Raising any safeguarding support needs from the sport/physical activity sector to the Partnership.
For more information on please contact Lawrie Baker lawrie.baker@surreycc.gov.uk