Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children requires effective co-ordination in every local area. For this reason, the Children Act 2004 required each Local Authority to establish a Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB).
Wigan Safeguarding Children Board acts as the key statutory mechanism for agreeing how the relevant organisations in Wigan co-operate to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in that locality, and for ensuring the effectiveness of what they do.
Detailed on this website is the Wigan Safeguarding Children Board (WSCB) child protection procedures that represent an agreed framework for working together with respect to the prevention, identification and investigation of abuse and neglect within the Wigan Council area, based on best practice identified from local experience and from across the country.
They clarify the expectations placed on partner agencies as to how they, and their respective staff, will conduct their roles and responsibilities relating to protecting, safeguarding and promoting the welfare and development of all children and young people within the Wigan Council area, through working together.
Best practice requires those working with children and families to be sensitive to differing family patterns and lifestyles and to child rearing patterns that vary across different racial, ethnic and cultural groups. However, we “must be clear that child abuse cannot be condoned for religious or cultural reasons” and, “all children, whatever their religious or cultural background, must receive the same care and safeguards with regard to abuse and neglect”. It is the duty of individual professionals, and their employing agency, to ensure that any assessment focuses on the needs of the child, in order to ensure appropriate safeguarding steps are taken, when a child is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm.
In conjunction with the Children, Young People and their Families Strategic Partnerships ‘Change for Children and Young People System’ (CfCYPS), which “provides a framework for promoting children and young people’s well-being and ensuring their safety,” they represent a new integrated system based on ‘Common Processes and a Common Assessment Framework’ for planning co-ordinated interventions based on collecting, sharing and using interventions to improve outcomes for children, young people and their families.
To view the procedures you can either click on the link below or you can view the pages that are titled by the sections of the procedure document.
