In July 2024, the decision was made to separate the Pan-Dorset Safeguarding Children’s Partnership into two partnerships; one covering the Dorset Council area and the other covering the Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole (BCP) area.

Each Safeguarding Children Partnership has a statutory responsibility as set out in the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance (2026) for leadership and multi-agency co-ordination of “arrangements to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children”

Accountability for the Dorset Safeguarding Children Partnership rests with three organisations with a “shared and equal duty” to engage with all other “relevant agencies” working with children and young people to ensure a coherent approach to the wider, local safeguarding system. These organisations are Dorset Council, NHS Dorset (Integrated Care Board) and Dorset Police.

Statutory guidance Working Together (2023) introduced the roles of Lead Safeguarding Partners (LSPs) and Delegated Safeguarding Partners (DSPs) with clear roles and responsibilities for how they interact, lead, and deliver the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements for Dorset. The three Lead Safeguarding Partners are:  

• Chief Executive, Dorset Council 

• Chief Executive, NHS Dorset (Integrated Care Board) 

• Chief Constable, Dorset Police 

WHAT ARE THE MULTI-AGENCY SAFEGUARDING ARRANGEMENTS (MASAs)? 

The MASAs recognise that strong collaborative leadership and timely decision making are crucial to the effectiveness of multi-agency working and to identify and address system issues. Protecting children from abuse, neglect and exploitation requires multi-agency join up and co-operation at all levels and local organisations and agencies who work with children and families play a significant and often statutory role when it comes to safeguarding children. This means: 

• Having a clear, shared vision for how to improve outcomes for children locally across all levels of need and all types of harm  

• There is a prompt, appropriate and effective response to a child who is identified as suffering or likely to suffer significant harm to ensure the protection and support of the child 

• Organisations and agencies are challenged appropriately, effectively holding one another to account  

• The voice of children and families combined with the knowledge of experienced practitioners and insights from data, provides a greater understanding of the areas of strength and/or improvement within arrangements and practice  

• Information is sought, analysed, shared, and broken down by protected characteristics to facilitate more accurate and timely decision-making for children and families, and to understand outcomes for different communities of children  

• There is effective collection, sharing and analysis of data, enables early identification of new safeguarding risks, issues, emerging threats, and joined-up responses across relevant agencies  

• Senior leaders promote and embed a learning culture which supports local services to become more reflective and implement changes to practice, and have a good knowledge and understanding about the quality of local practice and its impact on children and families 

The Multi-agency Safeguarding Arrangements (MASAs) document sets out what the local arrangements are so partners and relevant agencies are clear about how they function to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and how.

The Dorset Safeguarding Children Partnership Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements can be found here.

Dorset SCP Multi-Agency QA Framework

DSCP Strategic Priorities 2025-2027

Methodology utilised to derive these priority areas:

These priority areas for the Partnership have been derived following the triangulation of a number of different methodologies and sources of data in relation to child safeguarding, namely: local and national data, local and national learning reviews, single agency and multi-agency audit findings, feedback from children, young people and families as well as practitioners working with children, young people and families. The priority areas were then presented through the Partnership’s governance arrangements, with final sign off from the Dorset Safeguarding Children Partnership Board and the Lead Safeguarding Partners (LSPs).

The Partnership recognises that there is further development work to strengthen the methodology for setting its strategic priorities going forwards, and this will include consideration for the completion of a joint strategic needs assessment, as well as triangulating data and other sources of information from other local Partnership’s and Boards, such as the Community Safety Partnership.

Rationale for removal of previous priority area number 3 (Neglect):

Despite neglect continuing to feature in both national and local reviews, the Partnership have decided to remove this as a specific priority area for 2025-2027 due to the fact that the Partnership have already completed scrutiny activity in this area (and this was completed as a Pan-Dorset scrutiny activity). The Partnership therefore have an action plan already established following this scrutiny activity, which clearly sets out the steps the Partnership needs to take to ensure that agencies and professionals are effectively recognising and responding to child neglect. The DSCP neglect strategy is currently being reviewed and updated, and this will then provide the strategic direction for the Partnership’s work around neglect.

The Partnership will then test for the impact of the revised strategy and action plan once this has been established and embedded for a period of 6 months.

However, the Partnership recognises that neglect is often a feature in other safeguarding areas for children and young people, such as extra-familial harm, domestic abuse, violence against women and girls and children’s mental health and wellbeing. Therefore, the impact of neglect will be considered and assessed within the Partnership’s work in relation to the following agreed priority areas.

Priority 1: Violence experienced by children and young people

a)       Extra-familial harm (including physical violence, knife crime, sexual violence and abuse including on-line abuse).

Why is this a priority?

In the previous set of the Partnership’s strategic priorities 2023-2025, physical violence and knife crime and sexual violence and abuse, including on-line abuse featured as separate sub-categories of priority area number one (violence experienced by children and young people). The Partnership agreed to retain these sub-priority areas for 2025-2027 but bring them under the umbrella term of extra-familial harm, which includes various different types of harm that children and young people can experience outside of the family environment. This also reflects the Partnership’s recently published extra-familial harm strategy.  Despite the numbers of under 18-year-olds as victims of knife crime having remained consistently low across the reporting period 2024-2025, the overall numbers of under 18-year-olds as victims of public place violent crimes remains high. Although noting that the number of repeat victims of public place violent crime has also remained stable since this was originally set as a priority area in 2023. In recognition of the fact that overall numbers of public place violent crimes where under 18-year-olds are victims remains high, the Partnership have agreed to retain this as a priority area given there is more work to do to try and reduce these numbers. In relation to sexual violence and abuse, the Partnership have identified further learning in this area from recent local learning reviews which indicate that not all previous learning has been embedded across practice. In addition, the latest quarterly data shows that the number of children experiencing sexual exploitation has risen in the last year. There is a concern that the number of children experiencing sexual exploitation are underrepresented at the extra-familial harm panels, and so the Partnership is working to address this.

b)       Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG)

Why is this a priority?

The Partnership recognises that violence against women and girls (VAWG) is increasing nationally and locally and so wanted to establish this as a sub-priority area in its own right.  Violence against women and girls makes up just under 20%  per cent of all recorded crime in England and Wales. In the year ending March 2023, police recorded 103,135 rape and serious sexual offences. The Violence against Women and Girls research update (November 2023) contains a number of different data sources in relation to VAWG from across a number of different agencies and sectors.   There has already been a significant amount of multi-agency activity in relation to raising awareness and utilising preventative measures in relation to VAWG including:  • The Pineapple Project led by Dorset Council in conjunction with partners and local businesses has a strong focus on promoting and intervening around VAWG • The Partnership’s annual conference held in November 2024 was focused on VAWG

Priority 2: Domestic violence and abuse

Why is this a priority?

Domestic abuse continues to feature as one of the highest proportion of reasons for referral to Children’s Social Care nationally and locally. The number of children identified as living in households where there has been reported domestic abuse has remained stable since Q3 2023/2024, with a slight increase in numbers in Q2 2024/2025. The number of referrals to Children’s Social Care where domestic abuse was a factor increased by forty from 191 to 231, the highest level seen for seven quarters. We also know that from the domestic abuse quality assurance activity completed by the Partnership in 2023-2024, that coercive control continues to be an area where professionals require additional support recognising and effectively responding to. In addition, a recent local child safeguarding practice review, and individual multi-agency reviews, have highlighted learning around how professionals recognise and respond to domestic abuse.

Priority 3:    The impact of children’s and parental mental health and wellbeing on children

Why is this a priority?

The Partnership decided to rename this priority, from the previous priority set of ‘children’s mental health and wellbeing’, to refine its area of focus to acknowledge that children’s mental health and emotional well-being is a broad area, not all of which is not overseen by the Dorset Safeguarding Children Partnership. The Partnership have refined the focus down to the impact children’s and parental mental health and wellbeing on children.  Despite the slight reduction in quarter two data 2024/2025 in the number of children receiving a service from CAMHS, the numbers remain high overall. Mental health continues to be a predominant concern in referrals from the Police, and within social care and health, including child attendances at A+E departments. In total, there were 765 referrals to Children’s Services family support and advice line related to child mental health from April 2024-March 2025. In addition, we have also had a recent child safeguarding practice review where there was a strong theme in the review of support required for the young person’s mental health and emotional well-being. Between March 2024-2025, parental mental health overtook domestic abuse as the primary reason for referrals to Children’s Social Care.  This mirrors the national trend which is set out in the ADCS Safeguarding Pressures Report (on page 9) as follows “And, for the first time, poor parental mental health has overtaken domestic abuse as the most common factor in children’s social care assessments” There are some questions to be unpicked in terms of whether the higher number of referrals relating to parental mental health are due to increased mental health issues for parents/carers and/or whether partner agencies and Dorset Children’s Services are identifying these concerns. There has been some progress in relation to this priority area, in relation to the implementation locally of the national initiative ‘right care, right person’, for example. However, the Partnership decided that this would be retained as a priority area until we are satisfied that such initiatives have been embedded in practice and are making a difference to the overall numbers of children seeking mental health support and that we are satisfied that this is appropriately recognised and responded to across the Partnership.

The action plan that will sit underneath these priorities will be published in due course.

The previous Pan-Dorset Safeguarding Children Partnership agreed Principles for How We Work Together:

The previous PDSCP have adopted the principles of a trauma-informed approach to working with our children, young people and families, as well as our colleagues.

Please find these principles here

There are existing toolkits that have been developed that organisations can assess themselves against in terms of a trauma-informed approach which can be found here