Working Together to Safeguard Children has evolved through several revisions. It contains
detailed procedural guidance on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and
families. The parts of the document that are statutory guidance for particular organisations
are set out below. It is not necessary for all practitioners to read every part of Working
Together to understand the principles and perform their roles effectively; Table 1 sets out
for reference which parts of the document are particularly relevant to different roles. But
the rest of the document contains information that may also be useful.
Over time, Working Together has become a lengthy document containing a good deal of
material on the roles of different organisations and how to safeguard children in different
situations. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) will be working with
stakeholders on what might be done to present the document more effectively to ensure
that the statutory requirements on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children are
not inadvertently obscured by non-statutory guidance. It will also work in partnership with
stakeholders to produce a short practitioner guide. In the shorter term, the Department
intends to produce an easily navigable web-based version of this document, with
hyperlinks to relevant supporting guidance.
This revision of Working Together is being published at around the same time as new
guidance on Children’s Trusts: Statutory guidance on co-operation arrangements, including
the Children’s Trust Board and the Children and Young People’s Plan. The purpose of the
Children’s Trust Board is to bring all partners with a role in improving outcomes for children
together to agree a common strategy on how they will co-operate to improve children’s
wellbeing and to help embed partnership in partners’ routine delivery of their own
functions. It is therefore essential that Children’s Trust Boards and Local Safeguarding
Children Boards – the latter responsible for co-ordinating work to safeguard and promote
the welfare of children – work closely together. This is addressed in Chapter 3 of this
guidance.
