Cumbria Local Safeguarding Children Board
Business Plan 2009-2010

Cumbria Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) continues to have the lead responsibility of co-ordinating and ensuring the effectiveness of local work to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.

All agencies providing services for Cumbria’s children and young people are united in their commitment and duty to deliver the Every Child Matters Outcomes.  Cumbria LSCB has been involved in the development of the Children and Young People plan and has contributed to the Staying Safe priorities.  LSCB have worked closed with the Domestic Violence Board and the Mappa SMB.  The Board will engage in a number of cross cutting activities in 2009-10 in order to ensure that the Children’s Trust and related Boards are working together to improve outcomes for children.

Cumbria LSCB has a particular focus on the “staying safe” outcome and continue to focus on “core business” to ensure that child protection practice across agencies is sound

The LSCB have agreed an operational definition of safeguarding children as:

“Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children with complex needs and compromised parenting, including

children in need whose carers cannot provide safe homes, in order to:

• Protect them from maltreatment
• Prevent impairment of their health or development
• Ensure that they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care; and
• Undertaking that role so as to enable those children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully”

Cumbria LSCB has carried out an audit of multi-agency child protection practice and has reviewed its structure of sub-groups in order to take forward the Business of 2009-10  in a way that will ensure improved safeguarding outcomes for children in Cumbria.

Anne Ridgway
Independent Chair
Cumbria LSCB