# The designated safeguarding lead role

*What changes when the concern lands on your desk instead of being passed up from it.*

## Production summary

- Modules to record: 2
- Total script: 1209 words, about 8 minutes of finished audio
- Voices: Amara (host) and Nadia (practice educator)
- Level: Designated and deputy safeguarding leads, registered managers

## Accreditation wording that must appear in the description

- **The CPD Certification Service** (planned): Application scheduled.

> Do not upgrade any of these words in a description or a thumbnail. Aligned is not accredited, and planned is not approved.


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## Receiving a concern, and deciding what to do with it

**Runtime** about 4 minutes. **Words** 566. **Starts at** 00:00 in the full course recording.

### Learning outcomes to state on camera

- Apply a threshold decision and record the reasoning
- Manage an allegation against a member of your own staff
- Share information lawfully without consent where justified
- Write a record that stands up months later

### Script


`[CUE 1]` *One incident in your hands, four others held by the local authority.*

**AMARA**  [00:00]
What actually changes when the concern lands on my desk rather than me passing it up?

**NADIA**  [00:06]
You become the person who decides. And the temptation that arrives with that is filtering.

**AMARA**  [00:12]
Deciding something is probably nothing.

**NADIA**  [00:14]
Exactly. And here is why that is so dangerous. You hold one incident. The local authority might hold four others, from three different services, about the same person or the same worker.

**AMARA**  [00:27]
So my judgement is based on a fraction of the picture.


`[CUE 2]` *Section 42 three part threshold on screen.*

**NADIA**  [00:31]
Always. Which is why the threshold for you is not whether abuse occurred. It is whether a concern exists that somebody with more information should look at.

**AMARA**  [00:42]
And if I decide not to refer?

**NADIA**  [00:45]
Then record that decision as carefully as you would record a referral. The reasoning, the date, what you knew at the time.

**AMARA**  [00:54]
Why so carefully, if nothing happened?

**NADIA**  [00:56]
Because an unrecorded decision not to refer is indistinguishable from not having noticed. And if it turns out badly, that is exactly how it will be read, and you will have no way of showing you thought about it at all.


`[CUE 3]` *Decision not to refer, recorded with reasoning and date.*

**AMARA**  [01:12]
Let us do the hard one. An allegation against one of my own staff.

**NADIA**  [01:18]
Which is where leads perform worst, and it is nearly always loyalty rather than negligence.

**AMARA**  [01:24]
What is the sequence?

**NADIA**  [01:25]
Immediate safety of the person first. Then consider removing the staff member from contact. Then refer to the local authority, and the police if a crime may have been committed. Employment process last, running in parallel.

**AMARA**  [01:40]
My instinct would be to ask him what happened first.


`[CUE 4]` *Allegation sequence: safety, contact, referral, then employment in parallel.*

**NADIA**  [01:44]
And that instinct is the mistake. Putting the allegation to him before referring is investigating. It contaminates evidence, and it hands somebody an opportunity to influence witnesses who are also your staff.

**AMARA**  [01:57]
Do I have to suspend?

**NADIA**  [01:59]
Not automatically, and suspension is often described as a neutral act when it is nothing of the sort for the person suspended. Consider redeployment away from contact first.

**AMARA**  [02:10]
But?

**NADIA**  [02:10]
But never leave somebody in contact with the person while a serious allegation is unresolved. Those are the two errors, and they sit on opposite sides: suspending reflexively, and leaving somebody in place because you cannot believe it of them.


`[CUE 5]` *Investigating first shown contaminating evidence.*

**AMARA**  [02:26]
Information sharing. Do I need consent?

**NADIA**  [02:29]
Normally seek it. You can override it where there is a risk of serious harm to the person or others, where a child is at risk, where there is a legal obligation, or in defined public interest grounds like preventing serious crime.

**AMARA**  [02:46]
And how much do I share?

**NADIA**  [02:48]
The minimum necessary, with the people who need it, for that specific purpose. Record what, to whom, and why.

**AMARA**  [02:56]
Anything leads get wrong?


`[CUE 6]` *A safeguarding record with facts, quotes, times, actions and reasoning.*

**NADIA**  [02:57]
One thing, and it is Caldicott principle seven. The duty to share information for someone's care is as important as the duty to protect confidentiality. Under pressure people become over cautious and withhold, and failing to share has killed people.

**AMARA**  [03:13]
Last thing. The record.

**NADIA**  [03:15]
Same day. Facts, times, exact words in quotation marks, who was present, what you did, who you told and when, and your reasoning.

**AMARA**  [03:24]
How careful do I need to be?

**NADIA**  [03:27]
Write it as though a coroner will read it, because safeguarding records end up in three places: a coroner's court, a safeguarding adults review, or a tribunal. No conclusions you cannot support, no speculation about motive, and never amend it later without the amendment being visible and dated.

### Sources for the on screen credit

- Care Act 2014, section 42 and statutory guidance chapter 14, Department of Health and Social Care
- Managing allegations against staff, Local Government Association
- The Caldicott Principles, National Data Guardian
- Information sharing advice for safeguarding practitioners, Department for Education

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## After the referral: enquiries, reviews and learning

**Runtime** about 4 minutes. **Words** 643. **Starts at** 03:46 in the full course recording.

### Learning outcomes to state on camera

- Explain what a section 42 enquiry is and your role within it
- Contribute usefully to a strategy discussion and a protection plan
- Understand when a safeguarding adults review is triggered
- Close a concern properly, including feeding learning back to the team

### Script


`[CUE 1]` *Section 42 three conditions, then the cause to be made branch pointing back at the provider.*

**AMARA**  [03:46]
I have made the referral. What actually happens next? Nobody ever told me.

**NADIA**  [03:51]
Which is a gap in almost all safeguarding training. It stops at the referral and leaves you with no idea what you have set in motion.

**AMARA**  [04:01]
So what does the local authority do?

**NADIA**  [04:04]
They decide whether the section 42 duty is engaged. Three conditions: the adult has needs for care and support, is experiencing or at risk of abuse or neglect, and because of those needs cannot protect themselves.

**AMARA**  [04:19]
And if it is engaged?


`[CUE 2]` *Terms of reference agreed in writing before a provider led enquiry begins.*

**NADIA**  [04:21]
They must make, or cause to be made, whatever enquiries they think necessary. And I want you to hear the phrase cause to be made.

**AMARA**  [04:31]
Meaning they can ask somebody else to do it.

**NADIA**  [04:34]
Meaning they frequently ask you. Particularly where the concern is about practice in your own service. That is entirely lawful and it catches leads completely off guard.

**AMARA**  [04:45]
That feels like a conflict of interest.

**NADIA**  [04:48]
It is a real tension, and the answer is to build the independence in rather than object to it. Ask for the terms of reference in writing. Agree who is independent of the concern. Agree a reporting date.


`[CUE 3]` *Strategy meeting: facts and chronology versus defensiveness and minimising.*

**AMARA**  [05:03]
Why in writing?

**NADIA**  [05:04]
Because six months later, when somebody asks why the enquiry did not cover something, you want the scope you were given rather than your recollection of a phone call.

**AMARA**  [05:16]
There might be a strategy meeting. What do I take?

**NADIA**  [05:20]
Facts, not conclusions. The chronology. The person's own wishes in their own words. Who else is at risk. What you have already changed. And what you need from other people.

**AMARA**  [05:32]
What goes wrong in those meetings?


`[CUE 4]` *Protection plan with an undeliverable action being challenged in the room.*

**NADIA**  [05:34]
Providers arrive defensive and minimise, and then they are treated as unreliable for the whole of the rest of the process. Every subsequent thing they say is discounted, including the true things.

**AMARA**  [05:47]
So being straight is also self interested.

**NADIA**  [05:50]
Entirely. And one more thing: if an action gets allocated to your service that you genuinely cannot deliver, say so in the room. Do not nod and then fail quietly. An undeliverable protection plan protects nobody, and everybody has gone away believing somebody is doing something.

**AMARA**  [06:08]
What is a safeguarding adults review?

**NADIA**  [06:11]
Section 44 of the Care Act. A board must arrange one where an adult with care and support needs has died and abuse or neglect is suspected to have contributed, or where they have suffered serious abuse or neglect, and there is concern about how agencies worked together.


`[CUE 5]` *Four recurring review findings as four repeated patterns.*

**AMARA**  [06:30]
Is that about blame?

**NADIA**  [06:31]
No, and providers behave badly in them because they assume it is. It is about learning, and the findings are published so other services can act on them.

**AMARA**  [06:43]
What do the findings usually say?

**NADIA**  [06:45]
They are depressingly consistent, which is useful, because you can check yourself against them in advance. Information held but not shared. The person's own voice absent from the record. Explanations accepted without professional curiosity. And small concerns held separately by different organisations that nobody ever assembled.

**AMARA**  [07:03]
That last one is the pattern problem again.


`[CUE 6]` *Three separately closed concerns assembling into one pattern.*

**NADIA**  [07:07]
It is the same failure at a system level. And you can do something about your own version of it. Three concerns about the same worker, the same shift, or the same corridor is information, even when every single one was closed with no further action.

**AMARA**  [07:25]
How do I close a concern properly?

**NADIA**  [07:28]
Record the outcome, what changed, and whether the adult's desired outcome was achieved.

**AMARA**  [07:33]
That last one gets skipped.

**NADIA**  [07:35]
Almost always, and it is the Making Safeguarding Personal measure. Then do the thing that hardly anybody does: feed the learning back to the team.

**AMARA**  [07:45]
Without breaching confidentiality.

**NADIA**  [07:46]
Not the details, the practice point. We have changed how we record unwitnessed falls, and here is why. A team that sees concerns produce visible change tells you about the next one much sooner, and that is worth more than any poster.

### Sources for the on screen credit

- Care Act 2014, sections 42 and 44, and statutory guidance chapter 14, Department of Health and Social Care
- Safeguarding Adults Review findings and analysis, Social Care Institute for Excellence
- Making Safeguarding Personal outcomes framework, Local Government Association

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