Swindon Safeguarding Partnership and South West Child Protection Procedures - Protocol for children and families moving across local authority boundaries or abroad
At any stage in the process of working with children and their families, the parents and/or the child/children may move from one household to another, on either a permanent or temporary basis. This could result in a change of address possibly to another local authority area.
Such moves may be planned and relevant information may be shared in advance with the practitioners working with the family and child/children.
In some circumstances, however, the move may take place in haste, or even as a deliberate attempt to avoid the involvement of practitioners and agencies. Where this is the case, the agencies involved with the family must always consider the impact of the move on the child/children, including whether it increases the likelihood of the child suffering harm.
Working Together to Safeguard Children states (para 27): all practitioners should not assume that someone else will pass on information that they think may be critical to keeping a child safe. If a practitioner has concerns about a child’s welfare and considers that they may be a child in need or that the child has suffered or is likely to suffer significant harm, then they should share the information with local authority children’s social care and/or the police. All practitioners should be particularly alert to the importance of sharing information when a child moves from one local authority into another, due to the risk that knowledge pertinent to keeping a child safe could be lost.
