Safeguarding Role

This report is based on Daniel Pelka. A four year old boy who was starved and beaten to death by his own mother and her partner. In this report I will be looking into Daniels short life and identifying what happened to him. I am going to be exploring not only what happened but how it was allowed to happen and in what ways this young boy was failed by systems that are put in place to protect vulnerable children. I shall then give my recommendations and opinions based on my findings.

Safeguarding means protecting and promoting the child’s welfare and putting measure in place to prevent abuse. Child protection is protecting a child where there is reason to believe that the child has suffered or are likely to suffer as a result of abuse.

Section 47 of the Act places a duty upon local authorities to investigate such situations whereby 'there is reasonable cause to suspect that a child is suffering or likely to suffer harm'.

It is important to safeguard children and young people because no one deserves to be abused whether it be emotional, physical, sexual abuse and no young person deserves to be neglected and we have a duty to protect them from harm.

Safeguarding is an important part of integrated working. When professionals work together in an integrated way, they put the child at the centre of all activities to help identify their holistic needs earlier to improve their life outcomes. It is important to see safeguarding as

Safeguarding is everybody’s responsibility, and includes measures to prevent or minimise the potential for abuse occurring. Protection is considered a statutory responsibility in response to individual cases where risk of harm has been identified

Safeguarding involves everything a setting does, including their procedures and policies etc, to ensure children are kept safe and healthy, and that the risk of them coming to harm or being involved in an accident, is minimised.

The Staying Safe action plan recognises a number of important aspects in the wider view of safeguarding including:

Any individual who comes into contact with children in their daily work has a duty to ensure the safety and well-being of children. Safeguarding means protecting and promoting the childs welfare and putting measures in place to prevent abuse. Child protection is protecting a child when there is reason to believe that the child has suffered or is likely to suffer from abuse or neglect. In order to ensure this happens within a school setting, there are many laws that protect the welfare and safeguarding of children:-

Today we use the term safeguarding instead of child protection because it covers a much broader range. These changes were influenced by the first Joint Chief Inspectors’ safeguarding report 2002 and formalised in the Every Child Matters legislation outlined in the Children Act 2004. By safeguarding a child or young person we ensure they get the very best of the opportunities available to them for them to achieve the best of their potential while keeping them safe from bullying, crime, accidents, neglect and abuse.

|As adults in positions of responsibility it is important to be aware of the importance of protecting children and young people from harm. While |

Often children die or get seriously injured due to abuse or avoidable accidents. Society has a duty to protect children. We have a range of professional organisations supported by legislation, policies and procedures in order to do this. When the procedures and policies do not work society has failed at the thing it is meant to do. It is vital and that the causes of failure are known and dealt with.

The UK Government has defined the term ‘safeguarding children’ as: ‘The process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development, and ensuring they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care that enables children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully.’

This essay will attempt to critically examine the importance of interagency working in the safeguarding and protection of children and young people in the UK. It will consider both the challenges and how these have or might be overcome. It will look at key government legislation in respect to child welfare and pay particular note to high profile cased where interagency working has appeared to be less that effective in maintaining safeguards for vulnerable children, in particular. Consideration will be given to models of working that support interagency collaboration and of how some of these models may have been implemented in current

Before Daniel Pelka’s death there had been many serious case reviews for example in the same year January 2013 the death of 7year old Yaseen Ali. The key issue was audit training for staff at schools in terms of safeguarding. (Heritage 2016)