Safeguarding Arrangements 2025

Published on: 15 July 2025

Presented by: Minister for Justice and Home Affairs

Reference: R.113/2025

This content has been automatically generated from the original PDF and some formatting may have been lost, therefore it should not be relied upon to extract citations or propose amendments. Please see the PDF for the official version of the document.

Contents

Purpose

This document establishes the necessary arrangements required by Article 5 of the Children and Young People (Jersey) Law (2022) to safeguard the welfare of children and young people in Jersey and sets the framework needed for partners to work together effectively.

Background

The Children and Young People (Jersey) Law (2022) was enacted as part of a commitment to update Jersey's legislative framework in response to the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry (2017)1. It aims to strengthen strategic planning for children and young people and introduces specific measures to promote the wellbeing of children and young people.

The new Law provides clear responsibilities for named Ministers and Chief Officers to achieve a step change in multi-agency and cross Government working in the interest of safeguarding children and young people. This change along with wider aspects of the Law enables Jersey to provide an effective safeguarding system underpinned with improved practice standards and performance.

The new safeguarding arrangements replace the previous Safeguarding Partnership Board structure. The table directly below provides a list of key roles and functions which have been established as part of the implementation of the new Law. In addition, there is a diagram of the overarching safeguarding governance structure in the appendix 2 that describes how the new roles and function work together.

Table 1: Key Terms in New Safeguarding Arrangements

Term	Function
Responsible Ministers	Named Ministers in the Law who provide collective political oversight for multiagency safeguarding activity
Safeguarding Partners	Accountable government chief officers named in the Law who hold collective and individual responsibility for leading directorate and multiagency safeguarding activity
Safeguarding Professional Leads	Not named in the Law but established as a group to strengthen the delivery of quality multiagency safeguarding practice
Relevant Providers	A term used in the Law to mean a wider set of services provided for children or young people who

1 Final Report Independent Jersey Care Inquiry (2017)

	are required to follow safeguarding arrangements. For example, schools, or youth clubs.
Provider of related services	A term used in the Law to mean any services which are not exclusively provided to, or for the benefit of, children or young people but who are required to follow safeguarding arrangements. For example, a church or parish services
Safeguarding Partnership Business Team	Existing team (not named in the Law) that provides dedicated support to safeguarding partners, professional leads and the wider community safeguarding practitioners
Independent Safeguarding Scrutineer	Established in Law to provide independent specialist advice and guidance to responsible ministers and safeguarding partners.

Whilst the new Law relates to children and young people, there is also a clear commitment to enhance an integrated approach to safeguarding across the life course of islanders and this is reflected in the Government's proposed commitment to progress new Safeguarding Partnership legislation for adults. As part of this work a separate adult safeguarding arrangements document will be prepared during 2025/6.

Safeguarding Responsibilities

The Children and Young People (Jersey) Law (2022) introduced responsibilities for named individuals in public services who have a leadership role in safeguarding children and young people.

Responsible Ministers

The Responsible Ministers are:

• Minister for Children and Education

• Minister for Health and Social Services

• Minister for Justice and Home Affairs

• Minister for Housing

The Ministerial Safeguarding Group is a sub group of the Council of Ministers and will provide advice to the Council on safeguarding matters. The group will provide a political forum to consider a range of safeguarding matters for children and vulnerable adults especially those that require cross Government working. The Ministers are required by the Children and Young People (Jersey) Law (2022) to publish a report annually on the effectiveness of children's safeguarding

Safeguarding Partners

The Safeguarding Partners named in the Law are:

• The Chief Executive Officer

• Chief Officer for Children, Young People, Education and Skills

• Chief Officer for Health and Community Services

• Chief Officer for Justice and Home Affairs

• Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police

The role of Safeguarding Partners is to provide strategic direction, setting the system "conditions" for effective safeguarding, ensuring there are clear annual safeguarding priorities with measurable outcomes and ensuring arrangements are in place to meet core responsibilities with effective quality assurance mechanisms.

Safeguarding Partners have vertical accountability for safeguarding within their own directorate / organisation and horizontal responsibility across the safeguarding system.

At least once in every 12 months, Safeguarding Partners will prepare a report on activity they and Relevant Providers have completed in line with these published safeguarding arrangements, reporting on how effective the arrangements have been in practice. This report will be reviewed by the Independent Scrutineer before being presented to the Ministerial Safeguarding Group and published.

The Safeguarding Partners will meet at least quarterly to provide the strategic leadership to the programme of improvement, monitor activity and take decisions on the delivery of these safeguarding arrangements. The Independent Scrutineer will attend the meetings of the Safeguarding Partners.

The following sections set out the arrangements which will enable Safeguarding Partners and Safeguarding Professional Leads to work with Relevant Providers to realise effective child safeguarding practice.

Safeguarding Partners are required by the new Law to do the following:

Make arrangements to identify and respond to children or young people whose welfare appears to need safeguarding.

The Safeguarding Partners will ensure there are effective inter agency policies and procedures for frontline staff and their supervisors to follow to safeguard children or young people from harm, regardless of where that harm occurs. In addition, they will ensure there are legal systems in place to ensure relevant information is shared between agencies to safeguard children or young people from harm and quality assurance processes to measure the effectiveness of the policies and procedures.

The Safeguarding Partners will act as the Programme Board for any further reform of the safeguarding system with clear programmes of work relating to current and emerging safeguarding risks, taking account of the Island context whilst being open to learning from other jurisdictions. This will sit within an annual planning cycle which reflects the Government Plan, related strategies, demographic information, key data in relation to safeguarding, the experience of people requiring safeguarding support, feedback from practitioners and analysis of wider intelligence.

This will inform the priorities of the Safeguarding Children's Partnership where work can be progressed through time limited programme groups. This work will be supported by personnel in improvement and analytic roles including the Safeguarding Partnership Business Team.

Arrangements for planning, reviewing and improving safeguarding practice to protect and promote the welfare of children or young people.

Safeguarding Partners will ensure that core multi-agency safeguarding processes are working well, they have clear line of sight to front line practice and have an agreed programme for improving safeguarding outcomes.

The Professional Leads Group, made up of operational leaders from the States administrations will be the main mechanism to analyse and direct the real time picture of how effectively multi-agency safeguarding arrangements are working and alerting Safeguarding Partners of key challenges and emerging priorities.

The Safeguarding Partners and the Professional Leads Group will agree key annual priority improvement areas for partnership working and focus. Professional Leads will provide the leadership and co-ordination for each priority reporting regularly at each Safeguarding Partners group meeting.

Learning and improvement will be part of the culture of the Safeguarding Children's Partnership with periodic peer reviews and audits of the effectiveness of safeguarding across the system. The Quality Assurance Child Safeguarding Group will continue to progress a programme of audit and review that will advise the Professional Leads Group and, where relevant, the Safeguarding Partners on matters relating to current practice.

Safeguarding Partners have a responsibility to ensure appropriate review mechanisms are initiated for serious child safeguarding incidents where the abuse or neglect of a child is known or suspected, and the child has died or been seriously harmed. In recent years, Jersey has followed the practice of other jurisdictions with an initial Rapid Review of such cases which informs a decision about whether a Serious Case Review should be commissioned. In short however, the Professional Leads Group will determine whether the criteria are met for a Rapid Review. The decision on whether to proceed to a Serious Case Review will be made by the Safeguarding Partners.

Nurturing professional curiosity and challenge is a healthy sign of effective multi agency working and is to be encouraged. Where conflicts arise, these need to be resolved at the earliest opportunity. Safeguarding Partners will actively promote and confirm the operational arrangements within their own organisation for the Safeguarding Partnership Resolving Professional Differences/Escalation Policy2.

Arrangements for procuring professional advice on safeguarding the welfare of children or young people.

Safeguarding requires leadership, expertise and access to professional advice to ensure that all front-line staff are trained, competent and confident to make professional decisions-often when under pressure or where there are complex circumstances.

Safeguarding Partners may access professional advice from a variety of sources including complex parts of the safeguarding system such as health services. Designated Professionals play a key role in ensuring effective communication and understanding of safeguarding roles across primary and secondary care and their advice may be sought in relevant operational and strategic discussions.

There needs to be close alignment between Public Health activity and the safeguarding agenda with regular advice sought from the chair of the Child Death Overview Panel3.

Access to legal advice through the Law Officers Department and Criminal Division will ensure decisions of Safeguarding Partners are legally sound.

Arrangements as to the disclosure of information between Safeguarding Partners and Relevant Providers.

Sharing information is a key part of safeguarding the welfare of children and young people and needs to be managed within the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 which is the legal framework for sharing personal information in Jersey. Statutory Guidance4 has been produced and published to support timely information sharing to safeguard children and young people. Historic serious case reviews in Jersey and other jurisdictions have highlighted the importance of information sharing to keep children and young people safe.

Safeguarding Partners as leaders of the safeguarding system will actively promote information sharing as set out in the Statutory Guidance. They will do this by ensuring staff in their own organisations have an effective induction, attend mandatory training, in support of the Children and Young Peoples (Jersey) Law (2022), and have access to advice and support for professionals about information sharing.

In addition to sharing information for preventing harm to individuals on a case-by-case basis, Safeguarding Partners will review data collection and data sharing across the safeguarding system to identify safeguarding needs and risks to target actions in priority areas.

Arrangements for scrutiny by an independent person of the effectiveness of the arrangements.

2 Resolving Professional Differences/Escalation Policy

3 Child Death Overview Panel

4 Children and Young People (Jersey) Law Statutory Guidance

The role of independent scrutineer is to provide assurance in judging the effectiveness of multi-agency arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children. This is undertaken through objective scrutiny, acting as a constructive critical friend, promoting reflection to drive improvement, and considering how well Safeguarding Partners are providing strong leadership to fulfil their safeguarding children role.

The Independent Scrutineer will agree a programme of scrutiny each year with the Safeguarding Partners and can examine any part of the safeguarding system when the need arises including attending any meetings established by these arrangements. The Independent Scrutineer is invited to attend meetings of the Ministerial Safeguarding Group.

Independent scrutiny of safeguarding arrangements will form part of a wider system of review which includes inspections from the Jersey Care Commission5, HMICFRCS6, periodic reviews from other independent specialists and engagement with the Office of the Children's Commissioner7.

The Professional Leads Group is made up of the professional leads for each of the States' Administrations and relevant coopted others which may include representatives from the voluntary sector to lead and manage the multi-agency arrangements as established by the Safeguarding Partners. It is chaired by the Independent Scrutineer (as is the corresponding Adult's Professional Leads Group.

The purpose of the Professional Leads Group is to:

• Deliver and monitor multi-agency priorities and procedures to protect and safeguard children in Jersey, in compliance with published arrangements and thresholds.

• Ensure close partnership working and engagement with schools (at strategic and operational level) and Relevant Providers, allowing better identification of and response to harm.

• Oversee the implementation of effective information sharing arrangements between agencies, including data sharing that facilitates joint analysis between partner agencies, including with Relevant Providers where appropriate.

• Deliver high-quality and timely rapid reviews and local child safeguarding practice reviews, with the impact of learning from local and national reviews and independent scrutiny clearly evidenced in yearly reports.

• Seek, and respond to, feedback from children and families about their experiences of services and co-design safeguarding services to ensure children from different communities and groups can access the help and protection they need.

The Professional Leads Group will meet at least quarterly and are directly accountable to the Safeguarding Partners to deliver the six objectives in the statement of purpose above.

5 Jersey Care Commission Standards

6 His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services 7 Office of the Children's Commissioner

Relevant Providers Network

Relevant Providers are providers of services to children and young people or providers of related services and form a wider Safeguarding Children Network. These organisations play a vital multi-agency role in delivering safeguarding support and interventions that promote and protect children and young people.

All Relevant Providers and Providers of Related Services will be invited to attend a twice- yearly meeting with the Professional Leads Group to explore the operation of the safeguarding system and consider what system changes are necessary. Recommendations from these twice-yearly meetings will be considered by the Safeguarding Partners.

Supporting Infrastructure

A structured set of subgroups will carry out vital functions that will support and monitor the practice of safeguarding children and adults. These include:

Quality Assurance-Child Safeguarding

The group will coordinate the quality assurance function of the safeguarding partnership, ensuring high quality safeguarding practice is the norm across all agencies, there is an effective programme of audit and multi-agency policies and procedures are kept up to date.

Working closely with data analysts, the Quality Assurance Group will coordinate system wide data collection to provide regular reports to the Professional Leads Group and safeguarding partners to inform decision making about the effectiveness of the safeguarding system.

Learning and Development Group

The Learning and Development Group will have the responsibility to identify multi-agency- safeguarding learning needs-reflecting the priorities of the Safeguarding Partnership, learning from reviews and other quality assurance activity. They will commission and deliver high quality multi-agency safeguarding training and establish mechanisms to measure the impact of training. The group will also coordinate the collation and regular review of all safeguarding partnership policies and procedures.

Serious Case Reviews Group

The Serious Case Reviews Group will provide the co ordinating Rapid Reviews and Serious Case Reviews.

The Serious Case Reviews Group will have the responsibility for ensuring reviews are conducted competently and that recommendations are SMART. The group will also identify relevant learning from reviews from other jurisdictions.

Policies and Procedures Group

Review, update, coordinate and communicate all multi-agency safeguarding policies and procedures with the assistance of Tri X. Ensuring multiagency training is aligned to the current policy and practice.

Child Death Overview Panel

Safeguarding Partners have a responsibility to review each death of a child normally resident in Jersey and for the review of deaths of a child normally resident in Jersey at the time of the death.

A Child Death Overview Panel is in place to analyse information about child deaths, identify modifiable factors and propose action to prevent future deaths. To ensure learning and trends can be reliably identified, it is necessary for a sufficient size population to be considered and since 2022, the Islands CDOP has a formalised arrangement with the Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton CDOP to achieve this.

Safeguarding Partnership Business Team

The Safeguarding Partnership Business team is employed by the Government of Jersey and sits within the Cabinet Office alongside other similar arm's length bodies and is crucial to the efficient and effective running of the Safeguarding Partnership. The team comprises professionals with a variety of backgrounds and provides skills in multi-agency working, relationship management, service user and community engagement, working with the media, training design and delivery, policy development, programme design and delivery and change management.

The Safeguarding Business team will:

• provide secretariat support for the Children and Young People Safeguarding Partners Group, Professional Leads Group and the previously mentioned multiagency subgroups. In addition, the team will provide support to task and finish groups that may be established to deliver on the five priorities.

• Continue to provide high quality multi-agency safeguarding training that is consistent with best practice and multi-agency safeguarding arrangements set out in this document.

Appendix 1: New Safeguarding Governance System

Governance Structure

Council of Ministers Safeguarding Ministerial Group*

Safeguarding Partners Group**

Safeguarding Professional Leads Group**

Safeguarding Partnership/Network**

Summary of Role

High level political oversight and accountability for Government priorities

Collective political level ownership, grip and accountability for children's (and adults) safeguarding. Membership includes Responsible Ministers.

Collective Executive level ownership, grip and accountability of multi-agency children (and adult) safeguarding. Membership includes Safeguarding Partners and Professional Leads.

Collective Service Director level ownership of multi-agency safeguarding. Made up of regulated services with voluntary sector representation.

Network to ensure active engagement of wider safeguarding practitioners who will be working for relevant providers and providers of related services

* Receives advice guidance from independent scrutineer

** Coordinated by the Safeguarding Partnership Business Unit and receives advice guidance from independent scrutineer