Rotherham Safeguarding Children Partnership

The following principles apply when resolving professional differences of opinion:

The safety and wellbeing of individual children and young people is the paramount consideration in any professional disagreement. Professional differences of opinion, disagreements, or disputes that obscure the focus on the child or young person, or delay to services being provided must be avoided.

The aim should be to resolve any difficulties at the practitioner level or between agencies as simply and as quickly as possible. And in doing so be proportionate to the issues giving cause for concern as it is at this level that the child and their family's circumstances are known best.

Children, young people and their families should not become involved in differences of professional opinion unless it is deemed appropriate to seek some level of agreed clarification or their views, wishes and feelings are required to assist with a way forward.

The views of all those involved with the child and family should have their views and opinions valued and respected and any challenge should be in relation to practice and not the individual professional.

It is important to remember that multi-agency working with children and their families requires both individual and collective professional judgements to be made and these directly influence practice and decision making. Differences of opinion over professional judgements will not necessarily signify that there are practice issues. However, it is expected that any significant decision influenced by professional judgements have sound rationale supporting them which is transparent, evidenced, clearly recorded and where appropriate, communicated to all those involved in providing multi-agency services to the family.

Professionals have a duty to appropriately challenge one another when they believe that poor practice - judgement, decision making or delay may impact negatively on positive outcomes for the child; this includes where statutory requirements or local procedures are not being adhered to and includes where there is a lack of consideration of the child's wishes and feelings.

The number of Professional differences/disputes is reduced when there is clarity and understanding relating to the respective duties, roles and responsibilities of individual professionals and agencies and a genuine belief in partnership working.

Effective working together depends on transparency and accountability within and between organisations, and an open and honest approach between professionals.

It should be acknowledged that differences in organisational or professional status and or experience may affect the confidence of some professionals to challenge practice. This should not be a reason for this not to happen and appropriate support should be in place and provided within each organisation to enable and support its professionals / workforce to do so.