Child Protection and Safeguarding

We provide a robust, quality-assured process for delivering safeguarding services – working effectively with social work teams to ensure that vulnerable children and young people are not at risk, protected from harm, and safe from neglect and abuse.

Our projects support our clients to manage cases urgently, by providing a robust back office function and experienced Service Managers, supporting an expert team of experienced social work staff. We ensure that all plans are SMART in order to avoid drift in the progression of cases.

We liaise with MASH teams, carrying out assessments, identifying and completing (where appropriate) section 47 enquiries and Initial Child Protection Conferences (ICPC) to statutory timescales. We ensure that CP and Safeguarding Reviews promote the voice of the child and ensure families are supported throughout.

Our tailor-made services offer:

  • Diagnostic work (ensuring cases are appropriately managed according to agreed thresholds)
  • Enhanced, multi-agency working with the Police, Health, Education and any other relevant professionals to ensure cases are progressed in a timely manner
  • Creating SMART Plans for children, young people and their families
  • A hand-picked team of skilled children’s social workers to progress cases throughout the lifetime of our intervention
  • A dedicated Project Lead and Account Manager to provide advice and guidance on managing referrals and cases

Utilising Managed Safeguarding Services – the Benefits:

All of our projects are aimed at reducing internal workloads in your social work departments, ensuring that we work effectively with all agencies whilst holding all professionals to account in the promotion of individual’s needs and priorities. Our interventions lead to significantly reduced Child Protection (CP) cases on social worker caseloads, and we have worked with clients to reduce workloads by up to 50% across internal Council teams. Our projects offer:

  • Early identification of cases where there is no evidence of sustained change – ensuring that intervention is planned and implemented quickly to transfer/step-down cases
  • Improved KPI’s – 100% of cases managed by QAP meet ICPC statutory timescales within 15 days of a Strategy Discussion taking place
  • Updated Single Assessments to include research and a strong emphasis on the voice of the child throughout
  • A consistent social worker to implement the intervention to progress the case
  • Enhanced, multi-agency working with the police, MASH and other agencies
  • Increased throughput of cases (in previous projects by up to 40%)
  • Feedback and cascade of learning back to social work teams through Service Development and management meetings
  • Weekly Performance Reporting including case turnaround, RAG Assessment bandings and contributing towards internal Council key performance metrics (KPIs)
What our clients say

“Not dis-similar from the national picture, Surrey County Council’s Referral, Assessment and Intervention Service (RAIS) was experiencing drift in statutory timescales. This was being compounded by the caseloads of social workers becoming unsustainable and the need for a more effective ‘front door’ and screening process.

Internally, action was being undertaken to build a more robust Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub and we required a proactive, short-term solution to ensure that children were being seen in a timely manner and risk was being assessed.

Throughout the project the team were extremely proactive in managing performance and communication to maximise benefits for ourselves and Surrey’s children and families.

Cases were managed and completed in an extremely efficient manner and to a high standard. Feedback from our social workers has been extremely positive. Overall the project has been a success with the impact being felt across the Social Work teams.”

Kevin Peers, Assistant Director
Children’s Services and Safeguarding, Surrey County Council