Member

Provisions in Clause 3 allow flexibility for safeguarding partners to combine for the purposes of multi-agency child protection teams, but they require that the social worker and the education practitioner nominated by the local authority to work in these teams can do so only in relation to the local authority area that nominated them. This is the right approach to take for the children and, importantly, it ensures that the local authority with statutory responsibility for the child continues to be accountable for that child, even where the team covers more than one local authority. We do not want to change this and risk children slipping between the cracks.