Child Protection Improvement Programme: equality impact assessment record

Who will this activity affect?

The Programme will potentially have direct impacts on all children in Scotland who encounter formal child protection systems, including those subject to a Child Protection Register registration, those subject to relevant statutory orders and those subject to compulsory measures of supervision. Further, the neglect pilot will have impacts upon a broader constituency of children in Scotland who have not encountered formal child protection systems, but whom nevertheless have been identified as potentially 'at risk'. The leadership and workforce development aspects of the Programme will have impacts in relation to the children's services workforce and their approach to the delivery of child protection activity.

More specifically:

• Our formal child protection systems effectively facilitate a co-ordinated multi-agency response in support of our most vulnerable and at risk children; high quality help and support is delivered at the right time and professionals have access to the right information to enable them to exercise authoritative clinical judgement.
• Children and young people exposed to neglect in all its various forms receive effective early intervention from both universal and children's services professionals; practitioner responses can identify relevant causal factors in individual cases and a holistic approach is taken to intervention.
• Practitioners and leaders feel empowered and supported to deliver high-quality children's services tailored to the needs of their local area; their clinical judgement is valued; their professional registration and status is respected.
• The inspections regime provides effective periodic scrutiny of our child protection systems and practice; it is predicated on a culture of openness, honesty and high-quality self-evaluation; it does not instil fear or proceduralism.

Effective child protection activity is a fundamental cornerstone of Getting it Right For Every Child. Increasingly, research demonstrates that our resources and assets can be put to better used by focussing on providing early intervention and protection activity that is 'service user focussed'. We know that a holistic 'whole systems approach' to the delivery of child protection activity underpins the provision of effective services with a user focus and that such a whole systems approach can be informed by thinking about the delivery of child protection activity through a public-health lens, particularly in relation to neglect.