Serious Case Review

A serious case review (SCR) must be carried out in the event of the death of or reported serious harm to a child in England and there is cause for concern as to the way in which the authority, their Board partners or other relevant persons have worked together to safeguard the child. The purpose of a SCR is not to reinvestigate or to portion blame, but to: • establish what lessons are to be learned from the case • identify clearly what those lessons are both within and between agencies, how and within what timescales they will be acted on, and what is expected to change as a result • improve cross agency working and better safeguard and promote the welfare of children
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups legislation came about as a result
However, some of the reviews have been hampered by technical difficulties in accessing and using data and there has been some criticism of a lack of timeliness, and for repeatedly identifying the same lessons―. However: Understanding Serious Case Reviews and their Impact A Biennial Analysis of Serious Case Reviews 2005-07, Research Report DCSF-RR129, Marian Brandon1, Sue Bailey1, Pippa Belderson1, Ruth Gardner1, Peter Sidebotham2, Jane Dodsworth1, Catherine Warren1 and Jane Black3, stated;
.......Almost all interviewees said they had robust tracking mechanisms to monitor recommendations. Boards tended to scrutinise regular updates of the action plan at the serious case review panel, or the quality and assurance sub committee, or acoordinating implementation group. Two areas used a †̃traffic lightsâ€TM approach for the progress of the actions. Actions sometimes extended further into an audit of practice 88 Once the actions plans have been signed off by the SCR sub-committee
We also looked at other staff records including disciplinary records, conduct concerns and supervision records. In total we looked at the records for 23 staff members.
The recruitment records showed receipt of enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks (CRB) before commencing employment for 11 people. This was not the case for all staff. For one person we saw that they had been employed from 24 January 2011; however, their CRB was dated 1 April 2011, which means that they had been in post for over 10 weeks before this had been received. We also saw that for this same person their second reference was not received until 13 April 2011. This should have been in place before they commenced employment. For a second person we saw that they were employed from 23 June 2008 although their CRB was dated 10 October 2008. There was no second reference for this person. None of these files contained evidence of either POVA first or ISA first