Ofsted's National Director of Social Care,Yvette Stanley, discusses the important ingredients for multi-agency safeguarding arrangements to improve the response to children in need of help and protection.

Yvette Stanley writes 'Safeguarding children requires a multi-agency response. It cannot be done by local authorities alone. This is true across all aspects of safeguarding arrangements: from the frontline practitioner identifying a child at risk and making a referral to the local authority, through to leaders determining local strategic and operational responses to child protection issues. We must get this right for all children who experience abuse or neglect.

With the publication of the new ‘Working together to safeguard children’ and local areas moving to new multi-agency safeguarding arrangements for children, this seems an opportune moment to talk about the important factors that we see enabling effective local multi-agency arrangements for safeguarding.'

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