Quality Assurance Service
This small, specialist team ensures high standards of practice with children who are subject to protection or looked after. We support children in Southwark by looking after everything from children’s rights to access to records and are looking for other professionals with advanced skills to join us.
Though we work with other services in the Division, we operate at arm’s length. However, we have close working relationships with partners in health, schools, early years, community safety, and other parts of Children’s Services. We also provide management and support to the Local Safeguarding Children Board, which is responsible for the overall local strategy and procedure to safeguard the 62,000 children in Southwark.
Child Protection Co-ordinators chair child protection conferences and complex strategy meetings. More info…
Independent Reviewing Officers chair looked-after children reviews, ensuring that young people are able to participate. More info…
Child Protection Nurses give leadership within health settings for child protection, provide advice and training from a health perspective and analyse circumstances around child deaths for the child death overview panel.
Co-ordinators and Nurses also give specialist advice and consultancy and are involved in delivering multi-disciplinary training to professionals across a wide range of agencies.
The Children’s Rights and Participation Co-ordinator works to ensure that looked-after children can express their views social workers and local councillors. The co-ordinator also works with Speakerbox, a self-managed group for looked-after young people.
Access and Data Protection Staff include a Data Protection Officer who assists adults who were previously looked after to access their records and a Caldicott Guardian to give specialist advice on the Data Protection Act.
Specialist Administrators support child protection conferences and child protection checks, and help to monitor our performance against key performance indicators.