Kevin's speech at the Local Safeguarding Children Boards National Event

I’m very pleased to be able to welcome you here to the second Local Safeguarding Children Boards’ National Event.

Last year’s event was a huge success, and I’m very pleased to see so many of you here today. I’m also pleased to see such a range of different partners and organisations represented here too. I enjoyed talking to people who’ve taken stands here at the exhibition.

I hope it will lead to interesting and open discussions about how we can build on the progress already made, how we can make community links stronger, and how we can make children and families safer.

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you all for the hard work and your dedication to that difficult task.

Young people’s safety is not just something for the professionals who come into contact with children everyday to worry about.

It is everybody’s responsibility: children’s services professionals, community groups, police, fire services, parents, volunteers, the public, ministers and of course young people themselves.

And, although in many ways children and young people today are safer than previous generations, with accident rates and sudden infant deaths  for example down, we also have to recognise that the society we’re living in has changed and is changing all the time.

We’ve got different family structures, more diverse communities, and we’ve got new technologies are all broadening our horizons and opening up opportunity.

But also posing new challenges for safety.

It is no longer the case that, in many areas, everyone on the same street knows each other. It makes  parents more wary of allowing their children out to play.

Television, games machines, and computers mean there’s a tendancy to internalise young people’s lives.  And while the internet has opened up a new world of social interaction, it has also opened the door to new safety threats.

And clearly fear and anxiety exist around young people’s safety.

The Ofsted Tellus2 Survey quite clearly indicated that only a third of young people feel that they belong in their neighbourhood, and feel safe to walk around it at night.

4 out of 10 young people think it’s not safe to do what they want after school.

And, although crime has been going down – it went down by 13.5%  between 2001/02 and 2005/06 - the fear of crime remains.

That fear in itself leads to a decline in social solidarity in our communities and across the generations.

Professionals responsible for keeping children, young people and families safe have to respond to the new risks.

All of us have a job to do to inform people of the risks, to separate real dangers from perceived dangers, and to distinguish between the real risks and the rare risks.

Making young people aware of risk and giving them the means to protect themselves whilst still having the confidence to live their lives is a difficult but vital balance to strike.

We might put a swimming pool in our communities.  We can put a fence around it, put up signs for the deep end, and employ a lifeguard, but more important than all of that is to learn how to swim.

If we keep our children inside all the time because we’re frightened what might happen to them after school, we’re in danger of producing a generation who never get out in the fresh air, never exercise, never explore, never develop their confidence, independence and resilience.

In short, a nation of battery farmed children, whose only exercise outside formal education is their thumbs as they sit in front of their games machine every day, and the only fresh air the few steps from the house to the car, and from the car to the school gate.

But whether dangers are real or perceived, no child or young person should feel unsafe in their own communities.

As I said at the beginning of my address, protecting children is everybody’s responsibility.

But there is a clear responsibility for the children’s services – and for central and local government – to lead the way.

Everyone working with children is,  in any view,  part of ‘team Every Child Matters’ with a shared purpose to help every child succeed and keep them safe, whatever our role.

Some of the challenges we face in our local areas will be faced by all, and part of today will be about learning from each other, sharing experiences, and finding new ways to deal with those problems. 

But it is also the case that different areas face different challenges. The challenges are not the same in the inner city and in a rural village, although there are shared challenges, for instance.

Local risk needs to be assessed and addressed in context, with the expertise and resources unique to the professionals in each area.

That’s why we set up Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards in the first place: to respond to local challenges, which can only be done with the particular knowledge of a local area; to get more professionals around the table, increasing the experience and expertise; and making Team ECM as strong as possible.

Some LSCBs have come a long way down that road. But it is clear that there is much more to be done.

The former DfES survey of LSCBs in 2006 identified very real potential for the boards to make a marked difference in local areas.

And the recent Ofsted survey of Chairpersons of LSCBs – which will feed into the third Joint Chief Inspectors’ Safeguards Review – has identified some good progress.

Lead members are for example better informed about their LSCB than they were, and local safeguarding issues in their area, and there are some good examples of scrutiny.

Child Death Overview Panels are established in some areas, and one in four LSCBs are prioritising safeguarding awareness across agencies and improved arrangements to tackle bullying.

The best LSCBs are getting a broad number of partners involved, well beyond the minimum required by law, and are therefore running more wide-ranging programmes of work that are making a real difference to their local communities.

But there are still gaps – good practice is patchy, and some LSCBs are behind the others, with a narrower focus and organisational issues still to be resolved.

That part is disappointing  - that some are not fulfilling the potential that the survey in 2006 identified.

The question now is how we move forward, and today’s conference is an excellent opportunity to think about what we’re doing well, what we could be doing better, and what we can learn from others.

I think we all know what we are aiming for: safer schools, safer surroundings, safer services.

So that parents don’t have to curb their children’s freedom because they’re worried about who’s hanging around in the local park.

So that parents can send their children off to school in the knowledge that they’ll be safe both in the classroom, and on their way to and from school.

And so that whenever children or parents use a service – from their family doctor to the local youth club – they are assured of a high standard of quality and professionalism from the workforce.

So that’s where we want to get to – stronger communities with safer schools, safer surroundings, and safer services.

I recognise that’s a very tough challenge.

But I believe that the Local Safeguarding Children Boards have the potential to make a huge contribution. You are the mechanism, locally, to coordinate services and provide the leadership that can make change happen.

I cannot stress enough the importance of the role you play.

It is a sentiment we have reiterated recently in the Children’s Plan and even more recently in the Staying Safe Action Plan.

To provide further help and support, we have produced a self-assessment toolkit and examples of good practice, which are available here today.

We are also developing more substantial good practice guidance which we will launch for consultation in the coming weeks. I do urge you all to partake in that process, and to give us frank and honest opinions, so we can make the guidance as comprehensive and as useful as  possible.

In its role as a coordinator, there is a great deal that an LSCB can do to have a hand in shaping local communities, making sure that safety is the number one priority in local authority planning.

In the Children’s Plan we outlined a commitment to encourage local authorities to create more 20mph speed limit zones, which can reduce child pedestrian deaths by up to two thirds.

Speed bumps, cycle routes, well maintained parks and play areas.

And of course in our new play strategy that’s a key focus, and of course all of those measures help to safeguard the environment too.

But, for those local areas that are further behind the others, your first priority must be to get the targeted support right.

In my letter recently to Directors of Children’s Services and LSCB Chairs in February I highlighted the importance of the Serious Case Reviews process.

I want all LSCBs to make this the priority as we move forward, to raise the quality and consistency of the reviews, to make sure that the most vulnerable children and young people receive the highest possible levels of protection.

I’m also pleased to be able to announce that today we’re publishing the updated guidance Safeguarding Children In Whom Illness Is Fabricated or Induced.

Although this type of abuse is quite rare, it is extremely serious, and can have disastrous consequences.

So it’s vital that professionals know what to do when they have concerns about illness being fabricated or induced. So I urge you to discuss this new guidance within your boards to ensure that staff understand it, and know how to act if these problems arise.

I understand it’s available as I speak – on our website.

So, I believe that if we focus our efforts in the right places, we will see improvements right across the board.

By helping the most disadvantaged young people and their families, we can break the generational cycle of risk.

And, in doing so, we can help to safeguard the wider community, by reducing the threat that some challenging youngsters and families pose.

But when things do go badly wrong, we need to learn from our mistakes, and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

From April 1^st this year, every LSCB will have to put in place a process to review all deaths of children in the local area up to the age of 18.

Local authorities will receive £22.3m between 2008 and 2011 to fund the child death review processes, plus £10 million a year over the same period from the National Health Service to support health professionals participating in these processes.

But even with the right resources, how effective you are depends very much on the individuals sitting round your tables.

The more experienced, high quality professionals that you have, the more effective you’re likely to be.

I know there is a wealth of experience and opinion in this room today, and we can all learn a great deal from one another. But we need to continue that reflective process as we go back to our daily jobs, to learn from other professionals, and also to be willing to learn from our mistakes.

The challenges now, as we move forward, are to raise the profile of LSCBs within our communities; to get greater buy-in from other partners, to bring more professionals, more perspectives and more expertise to the table; and to focus on the most serious cases of harm in our communities. I think that’s the clear direction we need to take.

Today is the opportunity to talk about how you might tackle those challenges.

As you move through the discussion groups, I want everybody here in the room – including officials here from my Department – to identify just one thing you could be doing differently to better protect children.

Whether it’s a creative way of using limited resources,  which is a  challenge for all of us,  a fresh way of looking at a problem, or a new way of forging those important links across the community.

I want you to be open and frank in your views.

Share your successes, but also the concerns, or particularly difficult problems that your local area faces, and see if the group collectively can come up with some of the  solutions– either through past experience, or through a bit of creative thinking.

As I said at the outset, safety is everyone’s responsibility. And it should be everyone’s priority. With the right focus, Local Safeguarding Children Boards can lead the way, can draw out the strengths of its partners, and can bring about real change that will keep all children and families safe.

Thank you.