Child death review procedures are ready to be standardised

The forms will help establish the full circumstances behind a child's death and have been developed by the University of Warwick, which has also been working on a training programme for professionals involved with the child death review processes.

Local safeguarding children boards will be able to use the information collected on the forms to inform policies on safeguarding children in their area.

Peter Sidebotham, the research team's principal investigator, said a group has been working on creating national data collection forms for the child death process.

"We will have a standardised form for the notification of a child death, a form for collecting data about each child death and an analysis tool for child death overview panels to use when reviewing data," he said. "These standardised forms will collect all the information needed by a child death overview panel."

He said the forms would also allow information on a child's death to be collected at a national level: "There will be collecting of core data on every child death so we can make a comparison about child deaths and different patterns across the country," he said.

The training programmes can be used by local safeguarding children boards, which were required to set up child death overview panels by 1 April. Sidebotham said: "The training programmes can be used by local safeguarding children boards for training practitioners in the review processes."

He said there would be an awareness training programme to help people learn about the review process and courses aimed at frontline professionals. There is also training for new child death overview panels.

Training materials were due to be out last month, but the their publication has been put back. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has not yet set a date for publication.