Setting

Sharon Cooper, Director of Children’s Services, Warrington Borough Council Sarah Smith, Chief Executive, Warrington Borough Council Dr Liz Bishop, Interim Chief Executive at NHS Cheshire and Merseyside ICB Mr Dan Price, Cheshire, Police and Crime Commissioner Mr Mark Roberts, QPM, Chief Constable, Cheshire Police Richard Strachan, Independent Scrutineer

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Dear Warrington Local Safeguarding Partnership

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Joint targeted area inspection of Warrington

This letter summarises the findings of the joint targeted area inspection (JTAI) of the multi-agency response to identification of initial need and risk in Warrington Borough Council.

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Joint targeted area inspection of Warrington

This inspection took place from 18 to 22 May 2026. It was carried out by inspectors from Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS).

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Headline findings

Children in Warrington benefit from the early identification of, and response to, initial need and risk. Relationships across the local safeguarding partnership, both at a strategic and operational level, are well developed. Multi-agency safeguarding arrangements are strong and effective and are enhanced by an experienced independent scrutineer, who provides challenge in areas that matter most to vulnerable children. The ambition of the partnership is to prioritise the right agenda and build the right culture to support strong practice, and this is making a difference for children. The inclusion of education providers as a valued partner has played an important part in making the partnership as effective as it is. There are some areas where better initial information-sharing to inform early safety planning could make responses more effective for a small number of children. Warrington is a Families First Programme Pathfinder, amalgamating targeted early help and child in need

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Headline findings

processes and establishing a multi-agency child protection team (MACPT). This helps earlier access to services through the establishment of family hubs across the area.

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What needs to improve?

◼ The extent to which relevant partner agencies are involved at the earliest stage with the domestic violence disclosure scheme (DVDS), to make the process as effective as possible with regard to risk assessment and safety planning. ◼ How swiftly and consistently safety planning is shared across partner agencies, particularly at the stage of early planning and in relation to the practicality of expectations to protect children, that is placed on non-abusive parents or adults.

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Strengths

◼ The enhanced effectiveness of the partnership resulting from the strong inclusion of education providers, as exemplified by the appointment of a headteacher as the incoming chair of the multi-agency safeguarding partnership, via the Department for Education approval.

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Strengths

◼ Strategic relationships are strong and respectful, enabling practitioners to swiftly safeguard children through timely joint actions between partner agencies. ◼ Accessible family hubs that offer a wide range of effective multi-agency services for children and families. ◼ Robust strategic governance arrangements are in place. There is a helpful crossover for a range of strategic boards, with leaders sitting on a number of these boards to provide continuity and consistency. ◼ Innovative work on projects that are making a real difference for children and families. Examples are the phone free campaign, aiming to reduce phone-related safeguarding incidents; safe sleeping for babies, reducing the number of sudden infant deaths; and a focus on missing children and children deliberately fire setting, leading to fewer children going missing and a reduction in reported arsons.

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Strengths

◼ The partnership’s developing response to feedback, for example through feedback from children and families that led to a change to the format of initial decision-making meetings, previously known as child protection conferences.

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Strengths

◼ Quality and performance management arrangements are effective, and multi- agency audits stand out as a particular strength.

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Main findings

When children and their families need advice, help and support over a range of needs, family hubs are accessible, and staff are welcoming. The ethos of the hubs is to help and support children and families as early as possible, which helps to prevent their needs from escalating to the point that they need a statutory service. If children are identified as needing targeted or specialist interventions, this is escalated to the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH: t he team of professionals from across partnership agencies who receive, review and make initial decisions about referrals in relation to children who may be in need of support or at risk of harm ) for further support.

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Main findings

Partner agencies hold sessions and clinics in the hubs, including health visitors and midwives, speech and language workers and staff from agencies that provide financial and benefit support and advice about special educational needs and disability support. The partnership provides an offer of support to early years settings, schools and colleges, which is enhanced by partnership link officers who build up relationships with professionals and support them in their lead professional role.

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Main findings

A voluntary service, commissioned by the partnership, is making a positive difference by providing intensive specialist assessment to support vulnerable parents, reduce the risk to children and avoid entry to care. They work in partnership across a range of agencies, including hospital midwives, complete joint visits with lead practitioners and attend multi-agency meetings.

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Main findings

Valuable information-sharing between professionals takes place to identify what support children and their families need when they are referred for family help. Staff are diligent in checking that requests for services for families are appropriately matched to the presenting level of need. Family help services are a significant enabler of coordinated support, with named early help link workers who are highly valued by schools.

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Main findings

The 0-19 service receives referrals from early help via its triage and duty system, enabling children and families to get to the right place for the right support quickly. Health visitors offer a high level of support to children and families, and communication with other agencies is strong. Although support for children can be seen in their individual records, there is no systemic oversight or tracking of the progress or impact of children transferring from early help to the 0-19 involvement. This means there is no way of measuring impact and outcomes for these children. Health records reflect the voice and experience of the child, and flags are used appropriately in all electronic health records, identifying and highlighting specific vulnerabilities for children.

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Main findings

The police make good use of a range of markers and flags in their records to support staff to identify the most vulnerable children. This means, for instance, that staff in the force’s control centre (which handles calls coming into the police) can immediately see if there are children with specific vulnerabilities living at a particular address. If there is a call about that address, they can therefore make sure the police responding to the call know this. The police vulnerability and safeguarding team is made aware of all calls with vulnerability flags. It makes sure that calls to the police that involve children receive the right level of response. When frontline officers identify children at risk, they submit a vulnerable person assessment (VPA), which is sent to the police central vulnerability hub and processed in a timely manner. The hub assesses risk and grade so VPAs can be shared and prioritised by partners. This

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Main findings

includes sharing, when appropriate, with the domestic abuse unit, and police can ask for support from a range of services to help children and families.

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Main findings

Police use a daily partnership meeting called ‘Pitstop’. This meeting is attended by multi-agency professionals who can share concerns about children and discuss possible actions to support them. This adds value to support practitioners in making effective decisions about which level of support children should receive.

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Main findings

When health practitioners identify children who need help and protection, they use an appropriate level of professional confidence and make timely and effective referrals to the front door, using helpful tools, such as the domestic abuse risk assessments and the graded care profile, to support this process.

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Main findings

Education settings demonstrate strong and increasingly confident safeguarding practice, underpinned by effective relationships with the multi-agency ‘front door’. Schools consistently report that they can access timely advice from advisers in children’s social care, before submitting a multi-agency request for services (MARS). This supports accurate threshold application and ensures that concerns are escalated appropriately. For children who are at higher levels of risk, responses are consistently swift, well coordinated and child centred. Child protection strategy meetings and initial decision-making meetings (IDMM) are a particular strength, with schools and education providers routinely treated as a key partner whose insight into the child’s daily lived experience informs planning and decision-making.

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Main findings

Systems and processes to manage referrals coming into the MASH are clear. Roles are clearly defined and responsibilities set out to ensure that referrals are managed in a timely manner. MARS forms are appropriately detailed, including the necessary information to provide appropriate support.

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Main findings

The independent domestic violence adviser (IDVA) and outreach service is a well- established service, operated by experienced, diligent and knowledgeable practitioners. IDVAs complete high-quality triage and share information on immediate risk quickly. IDVAs are clear about thresholds of need and risks to children and routinely check that information is shared appropriately. They have access to recording systems and ensure that children are protected through immediate safety planning and referral of high-risk situations for children to the multi-agency risk assessment conference. There are IDVAs and/or advocates available to support children who are victims of domestic abuse.

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Main findings

Staff from partner agencies who are co-located in the MASH mainly gather information in a timely way to ensure that appropriate decisions are made about the level of support required for children in need of help or protection. Those children who are at risk of significant harm mostly have all relevant information provided in time to help inform decisions about the next steps. Screening is routinely informed by partner agencies and completed efficiently, with strong and effective management oversight recorded. Schools are generally spoken to directly, and children’s wishes and feelings are clearly recorded through these conversations. Schools are doing some skilful and creative work to help them to understand children’s wishes and feelings.

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Main findings

The partnership’s use of the DVDS, also known as Clare’s Law, could be improved. Clare’s Law allows individuals to ask police (right to ask) or be proactively informed (right to know) about a partner’s history of abusive behaviour to help protect them and their children from domestic abuse. Police are missing opportunities to flag requests to partner agencies early on in the process, so they can assess the risk together, share information and put plans in place quickly to better support some victims and their children. This would also allow better and earlier multi-agency focus on managing individuals’ risky behaviour. Positively, the police work proactively to complete disclosures ahead of the 28-day statutory deadline, and the format of disclosures is considered and consistent.

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Main findings

The child sex offender disclosure scheme process, known as Sarah’s Law, is well established. Sarah’s Law allows individuals to request (right to ask) or be proactively informed (right to know) by police about whether someone has a history of child sexual offences or other relevant offences or behaviours that indicate risk. Disclosures are made as necessary to protect children from harm. Force control centre staff understand what to do, and the process is managed by experienced offender managers who are alert to risk. If a DVDS disclosure is also needed, the processes are combined.

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Main findings

Contingency/safety planning is routinely recorded. However, when safety planning is completed by staff in the MASH, it too often places an unrealistic level of responsibility on one parent or safe adult to protect children, and this may leave some children in situations of risk. In addition, these plans are not always shared with the partner agencies who need to be aware and play a part in helping ensure children’s safety at an earlier stage.

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Main findings

Frontline police officers understand the need to listen to the voice of the child and to take this into account in their thinking and actions. They typically articulate this well in the VPAs they complete and in operation encompass notifications and share these swiftly with other agencies. Officers demonstrate strong practice in relation to using operation encompass. They go beyond their statutory duty and notify schools where they consider there is a potential benefit in sharing information for children.

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Main findings

When children and families need an urgent response, the local authority’s out-of- hours service, alongside partner agencies, demonstrates strong multi-agency practice. There are clear systems in place that provide consistency of managers, who can make decisions on child protection strategy discussions, placements and funding. The service is sufficiently staffed with clear processes to request support for visits and/or checks in complex work. Handover processes to daytime staff are well embedded, and employed Warrington practitioners and managers work on rotas and so often know children well.

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Main findings

When police protection powers are used, officers have a good knowledge of what is required. VPAs are often submitted twice to capture the use of the power, and again to describe the outcome. Positively, most children are not brought to police stations, as workers seek to make secure and safe family arrangements or alternative care directly.

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Main findings

The co-location of partners in the MASH works well and helps to support positive relationships and information-sharing about children’s needs across agencies. They also work very closely and are co-located with the Harm outside the Home team (HOTH) and MACPT teams, supporting joined-up working and positive outcomes for families.

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Main findings

When children are identified to be at risk of, or have experienced, significant harm, almost all strategy meetings are convened in a timely manner. Most meetings have the right agencies in attendance, but not always the professional that knows the children and their circumstances well. Despite this, all relevant information about the children’s needs and risks is shared, and appropriate actions are agreed. Minutes of meetings are shared promptly with all partner agencies.

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Main findings

When children need to be protected immediately, they receive timely investigations and a sensitive and comprehensive response from practitioners across the partnership. Effective and timely actions are taken to protect children. This is done in a manner that is proportionate to the severity and immediacy of risk and completed in a joined-up manner across agencies.

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Main findings

Most partner agencies provide an analysis of risk as part of such investigations, based on their involvement with the children and their knowledge of the family history. This is shared with the family and used to inform the IDMM. The child protection investigation has additional oversight from the lead child protection practitioner in the MACPT. This provides some helpful independent oversight of decisions and relevant information about the child and family before the meeting. Decisions are based on multi-agency information and professionals’ views, but outcomes are not systematically shared with all partners. There is a recently established regular meeting between the MACPT lead practitioner and police, aimed to improve information-sharing and to make decision-making more multi-agency, but it is too soon to be able to see impact in practice. The police do not have clear guidance about how they share information with partner agencies when they have

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Main findings

decided not to continue a criminal investigation, although we saw that some teams within the police have a process for this.

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Main findings

Children’s assessments are detailed and include the views of children and their needs throughout. Partner agency information about children, including known risk, is included and used well to inform the analysis for the next steps. However, it is not always clear whether all health needs have been assessed or what action has been taken to meet children’s needs. Practitioners reflect on the impact of situations on children and what this means for them. This helps to ensure that children’s experiences and those of parents, including fathers, are captured and that the right support services are identified.

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Main findings

The existing effective multi-agency working in Warrington has provided a strong foundation for the developing MACPT, which is an emerging area of strength. The team includes a range of experienced practitioners from relevant agencies, who are professionally confident, can work autonomously and bring their expertise to support some of the most vulnerable children. Health and education professionals prioritise referrals for support when children are subject to child protection plans, and probation officers have supported individual work with the perpetrators of offences against children. The probation link is an important advantage that helps with understanding risks in children’s wider networks.

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Main findings

Lead child protection practitioners tailor their work according to the needs of the children and families they work with and depending on the experience of the allocated practitioner. This ensures a sufficient level of experience and professional knowledge in child protection processes, particularly when the allocated practitioner is not a social worker. Lead practitioners meet families before IDMMs, and this means that families have information explained to them in a less stressful environment. In addition to this, families also benefit from retaining their existing worker with whom they are familiar. While practitioners from different agencies work together as part of the MACPT, their professional autonomy and independence are maintained through separate line management arrangements and reflective case discussions that are facilitated by systemic family practitioners in the systemic hub. While there are sometimes professional disagreements, mutual respect and a child-

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Main findings

focused culture allow for healthy challenges that strengthen the overall work of the teams.

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Main findings

The HOTH team builds positive relationships with professionals and children that support safety planning. Effective ‘contextual safeguarding reviews’ take place daily. Professionals use child exploitation screening tools, which are for children who are at risk of, or are, experiencing exploitation. The meeting works well to share information and jointly assess and review risk, leading to markers being added to police systems to reflect medium- or high-risk levels. Professional curiosity and summary by the chair are helpful, all actions are clear and the sharing of current and live information is central to agreeing actions and identifying risk. Children reported missing from home are offered a return home interview, and their information is shared with a police coordinator who makes sure any disclosed intelligence and/or crimes are recorded. The report is then filed on police systems so it is accessible to

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Main findings

the wider workforce. When children go missing, an auto-notification is sent to children’s social care. As a result of learning from this inspection, a further notification is also now completed when children are found.

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Main findings

Children and families accessing drug and alcohol services benefit from a service that has a consistent model of practice that focuses on and considers the needs of all in the household (Think Family approach). Visits take place in a variety of settings, including home visits, and are flexible to meet the needs of the adults and children.

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Main findings

Maternity services capture the ‘voice’ of the unborn child well, alongside an assessment of potential risks and identification of early support needs. Trigger plans and pre-birth plans are completed in a timely manner and shared effectively across multi-agency partners.

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Main findings

Midwifery practitioners across the specialist team and wider maternity services demonstrate good understanding of antenatal vulnerability. Professional curiosity is supported through structured supervision. Management oversight is strong, including the effective use of escalation when this is appropriate. Working relationships between midwives, MASH, police and health services, such as 0-19, primary care and the emergency department, are strong.

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Main findings

Partnership working between child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and partner agencies takes place, with regular communication being a key strength. A CAMHS practitioner is now co-located within the MASH team, improving information-sharing and strengthened multi-agency working.

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Main findings

Leaders in Warrington have a mature approach that has enabled the setting of the right agenda and to build the right culture to support strong practice that makes a difference for children. Clear roles within the partnership have enabled the development of good working relationships between agencies, which ensure that when individuals move on, partnership working remains strong and continues to support effective practice.

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Main findings

Leaders across the partnership have put in place effective policy and protocols, not only within the immediate partnership but also through the Pan Cheshire safeguarding alliance, which give practitioners a clear structure for their work and support strong information-sharing.

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Main findings

The partnership makes strong use of data and audit to understand and address need and risk. This not only makes the partnership more effective but also more efficient. Multi-agency audits stand out as a particular strength. Quality and performance management in some elements of early help, such as the tracking of health outcomes, is less well developed at present.

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Main findings

The partnership has embraced the whole system change set out in the Families First Programme, with the amalgamation of early help and child protection processes and the establishment of a MACPT. The partnership has made significant investment and provided strong communication, with leaders driving cultural as well as structural change.

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Main findings

Leaders have created a positive environment and proactive culture in the partnership, which has supported the stability of the children’s social care workforce, who told inspectors they feel listened to and supported in a learning environment with a systemic model of practice. This provides staff with a range of supervision and support, including reflective space through the systemic hub. Staff can offer healthy challenge and discussion when they do not agree but also understand and make use of the escalation policy.

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Main findings

There is a focus on creating innovative approaches to training and development, which involves working with agencies across the partnership. Training has been refreshed to ensure that it meets the needs of staff across all agencies. As a result, consistent messages are delivered and the expertise within the partnership is used to good effect. This approach is based on collaboration and sharing good practice, while ensuring all receive the best-quality training and consistent messages delivered through the partnership.

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Next steps

We have determined that the chair of Warrington’s safeguarding partnership is the principal authority and should prepare a written statement of proposed action responding to the findings outlined in this letter. This should be a multi-agency response involving the individuals and agencies that this report is addressed to. The response should set out the actions for the partnership and, when appropriate, individual agencies. The local safeguarding partners should oversee implementation of the action plan through their local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

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Next steps

The chair should send the written statement of action to ProtectionOfChildren@ofsted.gov.uk by Monday 19 October 2026. This statement will inform the lines of enquiry at any future joint or single-agency activity by the inspectorates.

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