By Charlotte Wilson, Service Manager

Earlier this week the Care Inspectorate published its report Preventing and responding to child sexual exploitation: evidence from inspections of care services for children and young people.  This presents the findings of a focused programme of scrutiny to see whether the foundations are in place to support care services to prevent and respond effectively to child sexual exploitation.

The Care Inspectorate has the responsibility to register, inspect and support improvement and innovation in services for children and young people.  We can therefore provide a unique overview of the quality of care services across Scotland.

What we did to understand more about child sexual exploitation in care

The Care Inspectorate undertook two distinct pieces of work, linked to the prevention of abuse and the support of children and young people affected or at risk of child sexual exploitation.  This work was undertaken during inspections carried out between April 2016 and March 2017.

The first stage was designed to gather evidence about what work had been undertaken in services to support staff understanding of child sexual exploitation and to ensure children and young people were supported and protected from the risks.  We analysed the information from self-evaluation of policies and practices submitted by services as a part of their annual return for 2015.  A total of 405 care services completed the annual return information in relation to child sexual exploitation.

The second stage of our work involved the validation of the self-assessment information which we gathered during the inspection year April 2016 to March 2017.  Our inspectors explored staff understanding of child sexual exploitation across 332 services, and evaluated how well services were supporting and protecting children and young people from risks.

The specific evaluation of child sexual exploitation awareness, training and practice was made at every inspection.  During these inspections, the Care Inspectorate made 65 recommendations linked to child sexual exploitation across 64 (19%) services. In addition, five requirements linked to child sexual exploitation were made across four services (1%).

Key findings

  • Overall, within registered care services, staff were generally well informed about the risks of child sexual exploitation.  They understood their roles and responsibilities and inspectors were confident they would act appropriately to protect children and young people who they identified as being at risk from child sexual exploitation.
  • Staff awareness was supported by well-considered policies, coupled with effective training and development which helped staff to be confident.
  • The majority of services were found to have either a child sexual exploitation policy in place or were well on the way to developing one.  Even where policies were not quite finalised, providers had been proactive in providing learning and development opportunities for staff to raise their awareness of this type of child abuse.  In some care services, we identified the need for a wider range of staff to be confident in understanding the risks of child sexual exploitation.
  • Where children were identified as at risk of, or had been subjected to child sexual exploitation in the past, inspectors found that the majority of care plans contained effectively-implemented strategies to help young people to be safe. High quality care and support was often associated with effective inter-agency working, collaborative arrangements across a wide range of partners, and confident staff who could exercise their responsibilities at the right time.
  • Private providers, generally speaking, performed better in respect of having completed policies in place at the time of inspections.  Local authorities were slightly further behind at the time of scrutiny, and a higher percentage of services in the voluntary sector were noted as having incomplete policies in place.  However, many care services in the voluntary sector were working hard to develop their policies and our expectation would be that this work should now be completed, with approaches to ensure these policies are having a positive impact embedded across all sectors.

Conclusion and recommendations

Overall our findings across the two stages of our work highlighted that the developments in terms of awareness and understanding of the issue of child sexual exploitation within registered care services are mainly positive.  The majority of services are undertaking appropriate action to protect young people from the risk of child sexual exploitation.

Where we have identified that improvements were needed we were able to highlight these to the providers in our feedback, sign-posting them to best practice, and, where considered necessary, making recommendations or requirements.

Areas for improvement have included: 

  • services ensuring all staff are familiar with child sexual exploitation and the associated risks/vulnerabilities
  • the development of, or finalising of, a child sexual exploitation policy
  • ensuring an effective child sexual exploitation risk assessment framework/risk management plan is in place for a young person’s safety
  • ensuring developed child sexual exploitation policies are robust and in-line with current practices.

The exercise of gathering information through the annual return process and during inspection activity provided a good level of assurance that overall, in the services that formed part of our sample, staff have a good awareness of child sexual exploitation.  The majority of services were taking appropriate action to ensure that they can protect children and young people from the risks associated with this form of abuse.

Service strengths

As part of the inspection process, inspectors were able to comment on what they see as strengths within the service and possible areas where some improvements could be made.

Themes on service strengths which arose from inspections were that:

  • staff had received child sexual exploitation training and as a result they demonstrated a good awareness of the risk and vulnerability indicators
  • protocols were in place with Police Scotland and social work services and this multi-agency approach was working well to protect children and young people
  • managers were ensuring their service’s child sexual exploitation practices were well audited and managed, and ensuring that where issues may arise the service could review and improve to minimise the risk to children and young people.

Effective systems are crucial in protecting children and young people.  However, we must not be complacent and must ensure that the risks associated with child sexual exploitation and the impact on young people has a high profile within our communities.  Staff working in care services must continue to develop their understanding and approaches in protecting young people from this form of abuse.

We have identified that across most services staff have an understanding of child sexual exploitation and services have developed appropriate policy frameworks to identify and address risks to children of child sexual exploitation.

Next steps

As our knowledge and understanding of this area of abuse advances, the Care Inspectorate will continue to address this through: 

  • prevention – ensuring that services remain focused on any risks to children
  • intelligence – collecting intelligence on child sexual exploitation
  • Improvement – sharing examples of effective practice as part of our work to support improvement
  • enforcement – through further scrutiny work being undertaken.

The Care Inspectorate will continue to inspect registered care services, and during 2018 and beyond will introduce new scrutiny models which reflect the new Health and Social Care Standards.  We will also continue to support improvements in the quality of care and support through our inspectors and other improvement support interventions, including in relation to child sexual exploitation.

As part of the Scottish Government’s child protection improvement programme, Scottish ministers asked the Care Inspectorate to work with our scrutiny partners to develop and lead a revised model of joint inspection that takes a more focused look at the experiences and outcomes for children and young people who need protection or who are care experienced.  In each community planning partnership area inspected, we will publish a report showing our findings.

The full report Preventing and responding to child sexual exploitation: evidence from inspections of care services for children and young people is available here: http://bit.ly/2ljtH06