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High-profile child protection cases such as that of murdered Victoria Climbié exposed failings in the social care system by revealing the lack of information-sharing across the health, social care and other key government departments. And the need for reform of children's services to prevent such tragedies from recurring has never been more prominent. There has been a wealth of initiatives aimed at encouraging organisations involved in providing services to children – from hospitals and schools, to police and voluntary groups – to work together to share information and thus, protect young people from harm. While no system can ever fully guarantee that children will not fall through the net of support provision, Sheffield City Council is establishing practices to reduce the chances of this happening. As one of 14 authorities, the council was invited by the Department for Education and Skills – or the Department for Children, Schools and Families, as it is now – in 2003 to trailblaze the tools and techniques required to establish best practice for Identification Referral and Tracking (IRT). A key deliverable of this project was an easily-accessible web portal known as SafetyNET, to promote joined-up working by helping children's services workers determine a list of other professionals working with a child. The success of SafetyNET in Sheffield has been a key driver in the Government's decision to deploy a similar system on a national scale. Known as ‘ContactPoint,' the national system is due to be rolled out across England in 2008/9. Originally, SafetyNET was a stand-alone system which gathered information from different local case-management systems by means of simple data extract routines. Although effective, key information updates relied on individual practitioners manually maintaining their support involvements. Subsequent partnerships with case-management system suppliers have ensured the system now integrates automatically and securely to these diverse systems, creating a robust and flexible environment for the sharing information across multi-agency teams. Together with basic child information, Sheffield has now achieved the real-time transfer of professional relationship information from the major case-management systems. Today, any interaction between a child and a professional, is instantly recorded, which has dramatically extended the effectiveness of the network of professionals providing support. This provides a new approach for the city council, ensuring children are placed at the centre of such efforts to support them. It works on a very simple principle: People work better when they work together. Sheffield council now has a complete system in place providing a solid foundation for the future. But delivering integrated children's services is much more than implementing a software system. Significant practice changes in organisation and operations at Sheffield were required to realise its full potential. And this has added real value and delivered benefits which will prepare the council for the current and future challenges of increased multi-agency working and the information-sharing environment. Things are going well. With the vast majority of Sheffield's 110,000 children's records on the system, this robust, fault-tolerant solution is vital to the secure delivery of a truly connected and collaborative infrastructure. Taking the complexity out of the need to share information has been a key challenge. This implementation will minimise the potential for human error by supporting constructive, collaborative working while achieving Sheffield's overriding aim – to prevent any one child from falling through the net. Robert Fitzgerald is children's services product manager at OLM. OLM Group is an independent supplier of information solutions for children's and adult services w

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CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE

Providing a SafetyNET

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