Serious Case Reviews: Learning into Practice Project (LiPP)

Improving the quality and use of Serious Case Reviews in multi-agency practice to safeguard children

The Learning into Practice Project was undertaken between March 2015 and March 2016 by the NSPCC and the Social Care Institute for Excellence, funded by the Department for Education Innovation Programme.

The project developed and tested a number of ways to improve the quality of Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) and their impact on local and national child protection practice.

The goal was to help local safeguarding children boards and SCR reviewers to improve the quality and use of Serious Case Reviews. To that end, we developed and tested four mechanisms: two for improving the quality of SCRs, and two for improving their use. These were:

• Improving quality:
  • supporting commissioning and conduct of reviews through a set of Quality Markers
  • improving lead reviewer expertise through a series of masterclasses.
• Improving use:
• developing a mechanism for collating and producing accessible information on practice issues identified in SCRs, resulting in an overview map and range of briefings on inter-professional communication
• establishing an Alliance of national strategic and leadership bodies to consider and implement improvement work, from a national perspective.

We have also produced a project report setting out what we did and what we learned (see ‘Downloads’ below). An independent evaluation report, produced by the Office for Public Management (OPM) will also be available soon.