UPDATE NO 197 27 May 2016

Keeping Children Safe in Education

Safeguarding Update from South East Grid for Learning

The Government has just released (26^th May) the revised statutory guidance to ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ after the consultation that took place in January. The revised guidance will become active from 5^th September 2016 and is applicable to all schools and colleges across England.

Read the Government’s response to the consultation , and the revised guidance

Annex C of the new guidance highlights the addition of ‘appropriate filtering and monitoring’ to protecting children within school. The UK Safer Internet Centre and SWGfL have recently published guidance for schools as to what “appropriate” might look like. The two documents can be found either through Annex C or via the front page of our website www.segfl.org.uk  

Prevent – New resource for schools

Prevent for Schools (P4S) is a resource that is aimed at providing schools (all phases) with support around Prevent. The site has recently been updated to reflect the recent revised Prevent Duty that schools need to understand and build into their safeguarding practices.  It contains activities based on themes to help teachers address the focus areas of Prevent as well as the latest government publications and requirements for schools.

http://www.preventforschools.org

Trust Me – The charity Childnet recently released a new resource to support teachers in exploring critical thinking online. It helps to start conversations with children and young people around extremism and extreme online content. There are materials for both primary and secondary.

http://www.childnet.com/resources/trust-me

No Wrong Doors: working together to support young carers and their families

Gary Dumbarton of ADCS writes:

Hello all,

I wondered if you had any information about take up from your regions on this memorandum of understanding between children and adults directors. All the information is available on our website at: http://adcs.org.uk/early-help/article/no-wrong-doors-working-together-to-support-young-carers-and-their-families

Leicestershire LA have been in touch with me as their DCS, DASS and DPH have signed up to the MoU and are keen to share wider. Before I include anything in our bulletin I wanted to try and find out if other LAs have adopted and signed up. Any knowledge you could share would be really helpful, Thank you

Please reply direct to gary.dumbarton@adcs.org.uk : 0161 826 9485 

Audit Improvement Project

Kim Drake (DCS at Southampton) is the lead on a new SESLIP project designed to consider how we can work across the region to improve the quality of audit work. As part of this project Kim is looking to investigate the appetite for sharing best practice and the potential for peer auditing between authorities. 

As a starting point we are looking to identify a list of contacts to start the dialogue with. We envisage that this will probably be Quality Assurance/Audit Managers and Principal Social Workers. To help us build the contact list please can you advise who you would like to involve in the project and provide their contact details (name, job title, email address and phone number) to Richard Tyndall (contact details below).

New Ways of Working in Social Work

Exploring how flexible job design can drive the retention, recruitment and performance of social workers 

A partnership event from The Timewise Foundation, Skills for Care and the LGA.

Monday 11 July 2016
Skills for Care London Office, 4th floor, 7-12 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9LT
Registration 12:00, for a prompt 12:30 start. 15:45 Close

You are invited to a workshop to explore new ways of working in social work, specifically whether adapting to time, place and task based flexibility could improve the retention, recruitment and performance of experienced social workers.

You will hear the latest insights on developing new ways of working for social work that will improve the resilience and performance of this vital service.

Online booking here places are limited to two per organisation.

Topical Peer Challenge Round 9

Topical Peer Challenge Round 9 is now open. The detailed guidance is available here, and is largely unchanged from previous versions.

Portsmouth (topic: CSE) is confirmed for 28/29 November. The visiting DCS will be Alison Alexander (invitations to the rest of the visiting team are going out today).

Medway (topic: CIN) and Bracknell Forest (topic: LSCB) are now in planning

Windsor and Maidenhead (topic: Corporate Parenting) is now postponed. All enquiries to Richard Tyndall (contact details below).

Southampton have a commitment held over from Round 8 (Ofsted, staff changes and other impediments confounded our best laid plans). I look forward to hearing from colleagues and others about whether or not they wish to join Round 9.

Kent (topic: tba) have also indicated they wish to participate.

Please contact Richard Tyndall (details below) to register your interest

Leadership Development

We continue to offer our successful portfolio of Leadership Development Courses all of which have been positively evaluated by delegates.

This year we have added a new course recently piloted in Hampshire and IoW. The senior team attended a one-day Coaching to Improve Performance workshop to ensure the Directorate were fully conversant with the training undertaken by their three cohorts of managers on two-day programme and to develop their own coaching skills to use in their own performance management roles.

We are also offering LAs the opportunity to train their own trainers for all our courses. Our aim is to increase the capacity and capability across the region  to ensure future sustainability within LAs.

A new departure for us has been running these training courses for adult services and for schools so please contact Di Smith, details below, if this is of interest to you. 

All courses are run in-house in the LA who provides the venue. Each course is accompanied by a range of training resources for the delegates including a comprehensive handbook. The current courses on offer are as follows and details of each course and the costs for each can be found by downloading the April 2016 Leadership Development Prospectus. 

Coaching to Improve Performance

Embedding a Coaching Culture

Leading Change in Times of Austerity

Step Up to Leadership   

We can also arrange one-to-one coaching, especially to support newly appointed 2nd and 3rd tier managers

If you require further details or wish to book a course please get in touch with Di Smith (contact details below)