About the WSCP
The Wirral Safeguarding Children Partnership
The Wirral Safeguarding Children Partnership (WSCP) is a statutory agency established by the Children and Social Work Act (2017). WSCP replaced the previous Wirral Safeguarding Children Board on the 1st September 2019. WSCP is a multi-agency partnership of organisations who agree how to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. The WSCP is led by the three statutory safeguarding partners and one strategic partner (Education) of the Local Authority, Merseyside Police and Health (Integrated Care Board).
Purpose and Function of the Wirral Safeguarding Children Partnership
The core objectives of the partnership:
• To co-ordinate safeguarding services and work by relevant agencies to safeguard children and to promote their welfare;
• To ensure that what is done is effective.
The purpose of these local arrangements is to support and enable local organisations and agencies to work together in a system where:
• children are safeguarded and their welfare promoted
• partner organisations and agencies collaborate, share and co-own the vision for how to achieve improved outcomes for vulnerable children
• organisations and agencies challenge appropriately and hold one another to account effectively
• there is early identification and analysis of new safeguarding issues and emerging threats
• learning is promoted and embedded in a way that local services for children and families can become more reflective and implement changes to practice
• information is shared effectively to facilitate more accurate and timely
decision making for children and families
The functions of the partnership are to:
• develop policies and procedures for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in Wirral;
• raise awareness in Wirral of the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, and to provide advice and guidance as to how this can be achieved;
• monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of what is done by all relevant agencies, individually and collectively, to safeguard and promote the welfare of children – and to advise them on ways to improve
• participate in the local planning and commissioning of services for children in Wirral and to ensure that they take safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children into account
• undertake statutory case reviews and local learning reviews
• provide multi-agency safeguarding training and learning opportunities
• understand and assess the effectiveness of frontline multi-agency practice
A key aim of the work of the partnership is to promote high standards of safeguarding work and to foster a culture of continuous improvement. Through its work the partnership will identify and act on identified weaknesses in services. It will aim to avoid unnecessary duplication of work.
The partnership should ensure that its monitoring role complements and contributes to the work of other influential groups including the health and wellbeing board, which in turn will devote a larger share of its business on the behalf of children and young people.
The WSCP is responsible for ensuring safeguarding arrangements across partner agencies are robust and for testing how strong arrangements are and undertakes a variety of work each year including:
- Publishing safeguarding policies and procedures for partner agencies
- Auditing safeguarding arrangements in individual agencies and collectively across the partnership
- Providing multi-agency training for the children’s workforce
- Undertaking reviews of cases, including statutory child practice reviews and multi-agency learning reviews
- Raising awareness of safeguarding issues and priorities including child sexual exploitation, neglect of children, domestic abuse and radicalisation
- Promoting the message that the safeguarding is Wirral’s children and young people is Everyone’s responsibility