We recently spoke with Claire George, Head of Peterborough’s Pupil Referral Service and Safeguarding and Prevent Lead for Education for Peterborough, about how they use ECINS on a Strategic and Operational Level for Prevent and Channel Panel. 

“One of the parts of my role is that I lead Safeguarding and Prevent for the whole of Education for Peterborough and we use ECINS for Prevent.

“Part of the prevent duty is that every establishment organisation must have a Prevent Action Plan to show how they are delivering the Prevent duties in their arena. As Lead for Prevent in Education I write a Local Authority Plan for the whole of Education which feeds into the Local Authority Council Plan which then feeds into the new Cambridgeshire wide plan.

“All of those Plans sit in an area of ECINS under the Strategic Prevent Delivery Board so that when that Board meets (and it meets every 2 months) all of those plans are visible, the action and progress on them are visible, each partner agency knows exactly what’s going on, they know what’s working well they know what to prioritise and what needs attention.

“From the school’s perspective we had an OFSTED inspection of Prevent within the authority and they were really positive about the practice and the way it is working. The Fire Service and the Police Service are due joint inspections in the new year and we will be contributing as a partner.

“We use ECINS at a strategic level in terms of Prevent and we also use it at an operational level to support the work of Channel Panel.

“Channel Panel is a multi-agency meeting. We come together once a month and that is about risk management and risk holding.  We use ECINS to manage the case work element of it, to do all the information sharing and the risk analysis.  You have got partners contributing their knowledge, information and their assessment of risk around individuals and when the panel meets they can make decisions, all of which are recorded on ECINS, about what strategies and interventions to put into place to mitigate that risk.

“That is a significant piece of work that we use ECINS for and a really strong example of risk holding and risk management.  I think ECINS has been absolutely pivotal to the way we are able to work. We don’t have any other system that can communicate across agencies, that is critical to the work that we currently do and ECINS is a very valuable tool in our toolbox.”