Opinion: Who carries the can when things go wrong in childsafeguarding?

In children's services in this country, it is getting ever harder to work out where such responsibilities lie. When Herbert Laming published his review into the death of Victoria Climbie in 2003, he talked about the need for clear lines of accountability, from top to bottom of the system. He described senior managers in positions across a range of statutory and voluntary agencies not recognising their own responsibilities. His recommendations sparked a period of fundamental change across children's services - bringing together the planning, commissioning and delivery of most services for children under the oversight of the children's trusts; creating the post of director of children's services (DCS) in local authorities to lead the authority's own services; and calling on them to take a leadership role in driving the necessary partnerships with health, the police and others. Every Child Matters also strengthened the role of the local safeguarding children boards, requiring each partner agency to take responsibility to work with their colleagues to hold each part of the system to account.

At the heart of these changes in accountability was an attempt to resolve an unresolvable dilemma. On the one hand, safeguarding is everybody's business - all professionals working with children should feel responsible for keeping children safe and promoting their welfare. On the other, if something is everybody's responsibility, it can also seem to be nobody's responsibility. A problem shared sometimes becomes a problem forgotten.

It seems to me that the patterns of stronger partnership working did help. DCSs had direct control over many services and had an explicit responsibility to ensure partnership. But children still die, sometimes at the hands of parents and others. Services did not become perfect overnight, and a constant stream of serious case reviews still show how difficult it is for professionals in different agencies to develop the trust to work in real partnership.

And now we see even greater challenges emerging to the idea of joint working and shared accountability. Schools play a central role in promoting children's wellbeing and keeping them safe - they are the essential universal service. When safeguarding boards were strengthened in 2005, schools were still partly accountable to local authorities, so they could keep a handle on practice in schools through the engagement of a senior education representative on the board. Today, more than 25 per cent of pupils are in academies. If a problem emerges in an academy, the local authority has no authority. Academies are only accountable to the Department for Education - and it does not send representatives to local safeguarding boards.

The DfE has opened a consultation on outsourcing almost all children's services away from the local authority. The government's hope is that in future, local authorities will put services such as child protection and support to disabled children out to tender to the private or voluntary sector.

Local authorities will still be responsible for monitoring how these agencies actually support vulnerable children and challenge poor parental care - but we know those local authorities will have a greatly reduced capacity for doing this, and it will become much more difficult for anyone to feel in control of what is happening. Monitoring through contract delivery is much more indirect than control through management. In the future, I anticipate that local safeguarding boards may have to extend their membership to include a dozen separate delivery agencies - and hope that these private agencies feel as strongly about safeguarding as the boards do.

The idea of shared accountability was never easy. Safeguarding boards have always been an honest but imperfect device for holding agencies to account and improving practice. Where a board worked well, it was because a strong DCS had built up trusting relationships with partners, and had good management control over many key services. Today, where a DCS still exists, their responsibilities may be wider than before, but their actual control over services will be much less. In many authorities, the DCS is a more junior position than previously, and finds it harder to challenge the local agency heads in health and police. Their control over schools has almost vanished. And from next year, they may not even directly manage their own child protection services.

The concept of a local safeguarding children board is as important as ever - in fact, even more important, since it is perhaps the only place where the key questions can be asked of each agency. But today, if we ask "who is responsible?", it is harder than ever to provide a clear answer.

Sir Paul Ennals is chair of Haringey's local safeguarding children board.