Approach to interagency working

Successful interagency working to safeguard and promote the welfare of children is notoriously difficult but extremely important as the Victoria Climbie Inquiry highlighted.

In Lewisham, we follow the London child protection procedures. These are available on the right and give more detailed advice about how local services should work to protect children.

In Autumn 2005, the Lewisham Area Child Protection Committee (the predecessor to the Safeguarding Children Board) commissioned a project to investigate and respond to the issues and barriers impeding interagency working in Lewisham. The project took place from September 2005 to April 2006 and consisted of the following phases:

• interviews of groups of practitioners from a wide range of agencies and services involved in safeguarding children and young people in Lewisham to discover both what worked well and what improvements were needed in current practice

• presentation of the findings and discussion of key topics at a series of three inter-agency workshops in November/December 2005
• development of the inter-agency Guidance for practitioners for the key topics identified as being most in need of improvements in practice
• presentation of the draft Guidance sheets to a second round of three inter-agency workshops in March 2006 for comment and amendments, together with a discussion of how best to implement the guidance effectively
• amendments to the Guidance and approval by the Lewisham Safeguarding Children Board.