[holding answer 5 February 2010]: The Department does not collate this information centrally.
Chapter 8 of the statutory guidance, ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’, published in December 2009, states that serious case reviews should be completed within six months from the date of the decision to proceed.
Ofsted has responsibility for evaluating all serious case reviews and considers the timeliness of their completion as part of that process. The second Ofsted report on serious case reviews, ‘Learning Lessons from Serious Case Reviews: Year 2’, published in October 2009, noted that “Serious case reviews are generally being carried out more speedily” but that “56 reviews took between one year and two years”. The report went on to note that the time taken did not automatically determine the quality of the review and in some instances delays led to improvements in quality, for example as a result of the effective scrutiny of overview panels returning inadequate individual management reviews. It went on to state that longer timescales raised questions about the effectiveness of the reviews in identifying lessons to be learnt quickly enough and thus making a difference in practice.
Chapter 8 of the statutory guidance, ‘Working Together To Safeguard Children’ is clear that where lessons are able to be identified they should be acted upon as quickly as possible.