Quality Assurance Framework
There should be a culture of continuous learning and improvement across the organisations that work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, to identify what works and what promotes good practice, and where improvements need to be made. The Sheffield Children Safeguarding Partnership has set out its approach to learning and improvement in its Quality Assurance Framework.
The Framework demonstrates how learning is identified, disseminated, and implemented within a multi-agency context. The Partnership’s Learning Practice and Improvement Group will have oversight of the SCSP’s Learning Cycle to ensure effective join-up across the whole system. A summary of the group’s activities will be reported to the Executive Partnership Group.
Embedding Learning across the system:
The Lead Safeguarding Partners have a responsibility to ensure that local and national learning is embedded in order to make improvements to practice. The Partnership’s Case Review subgroup will develop action plans once key messages have been agreed for target audiences. Learning resources will be developed and circulated to all strategic leads in relevant agencies with a request that they are embedded into their organisation’s operating processes with plans put in place for ensuring that the learning is having an impact on practice. The Case Review subgroup will monitor multi-agency and single-agency action to embed the learning and will develop an assurance position on behalf of the Partnership.
Evaluating the impact of learning:
To ensure that local and national learning impacts positively on practice and that changes are embedded, sustainable over time and have the desired effect, monitoring will be undertaken through the following processes:
- Performance analysis: SCSP multi-agency dataset and single-agency performance measures.
- Quality assurance and audit activity: SCSP multi-agency audit activity and single-agency audit activity.
- Survey activity: Consultation with children, young people and their families and practitioners and line managers.
- Feedback: From practitioners and line managers on the impact on practice of learning and development activity, and children, young people and their families on the impact of intervention.
Multi-Agency Audits:
The SCSP Multi-Agency Audits are designed to assess the quality of work undertaken by all agencies where there are concerns about children throughout the child’s journey, identifying areas which are working well and areas requiring improvement. Both single and multi-agency actions and learning are identified to bring about organisational and practice changes.
Recommendations are developed and communicated to the Learning Practice and Improvement subgroup for the implementation of any respective learning activity.
Partner Consultation and Self-Evaluation:
As part of the workforce development strategy, partner agencies are regularly asked to self-assess on different safeguarding topics and issues, arising from either national or local learning. The self-assessments set agreed standards for services to strive towards, identifying where the strengths and challenges lie and what plans each service has for improving outcomes and embedding practice changes.
Engagement with front-line practitioners:
Throughout all the Partnership subgroups, feedback from practitioners, managers and senior leaders is sought to triangulate and support or challenge the Partnership’s quantitative data and qualitative evidence. Practitioner feedback is sought following all SCSP workshops and training events to assess the quality and impact of the training offered. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review process includes holding a practitioner event to capture evidence from front-line staff of what is working well in practice and what areas need to be examined or changed.
S.11 Self -assessment audit and Assurance meetings:
The Partnership, alongside the Adult Safeguarding Partnership, jointly delivers a self-assessment to thirteen statutory services across Sheffield as part of the Section 11 responsibilities. Face-to-face assurance meetings are held in May each year (self-assessment tool completed 1st year, review of progress in the 2nd year) and offer the opportunity for senior leaders to meet with the Independent Scrutineer and Strategic Safeguarding Partners. Prior to the meeting, the panel members review each agency’s Section 11 self-assessment report and data on partnership engagement in city-wide safeguarding meetings and training.
Following this, all services sign up to an improvement action plan to ensure an enduring impact beyond the assurance meetings.
Feedback from children and young people and their families:
Feedback from children, young people, parents, carers and families is sought within the SCSP audit and review framework. This feedback helps to confirm or challenge the position found through quantitative data and qualitative evidence and helps to triangulate the information to reach accurate conclusions. Within the self-assessments and S.11 audits, the Partnership seeks assurance from partner agencies in terms of understanding how they gain service user feedback and how this informs practice development and service design.
Using data and intelligence to assess effectiveness:
The SCSP uses data and intelligence to assess the effectiveness of help being provided to children and families across the early help and safeguarding systems in Sheffield. The data and intelligence will be a combination of single-agency data alongside multi-agency performance indicators agreed by the Executive group. Skilled and knowledgeable data analysts will support the local safeguarding partners to effectively and accurately analyse and interpret data and intelligence. This will enable LSPs to judge the effectiveness of local safeguarding arrangements. It is the responsibility of partner agencies to provide a detailed analysis of cross-partnership data.