APPENDIX 69
Letter from Birmingham City Council to
the Home Affairs Committee
Thank you for your letter regarding the
Home Affairs Committee's current inquiry into Domestic Violence
and Forced Marriage and for the opportunity to respond about the
situation in our area.
You asked specifically for information
on what action we are taking to raise awareness of the issues.
We include Forced Marriage and Domestic
Violence in our Designated Senior Person (DSP) and Head Teacher
training and are robustly ensuring that this is taken up. All
our schools have completed, or about to complete, the two days
training and/or refresher training within the past two years.
We would support the extension of mandatory
training for teachers in domestic violence and forced marriage
within the context of Core standards in health and well being.
In preparation for the forced marriage
guidelines for education being put on a statutory footing later
this year, we have recently run a major training conference on
Forced Marriage. This will be followed up by a year-long campaign
by our domestic violence forums to raise public awareness and
engagement.
We have specific sections in our Birmingham
Safeguarding Children Board (BSCB) guidance to schools and services
regarding Forced Marriage and Domestic Violence, and we have recently
updated this.
We identified Domestic Violence awareness
raising as a key priority for the BSCB and for our Safeguarding
in Education Forum this year. The BSCB has completed six multi-agency
events this year, and has delivered six (school network) locality
training sessions across the city, at which attendance has been
good (200+).
We are working in collaboration with
Womens Aid (schools curriculum pack launched this year), police,
social care and health to develop information sharing and further
practice guidance for schools. To this end, we have identified
five extended school clusters who will assist us in working up
this guidance . . . Whilst the focus of this work has been essentially
on Domestic Violence, we do have an opportunity to ensure the
inclusion of Forced Marriage into our work with one or two of
our interested clusters and to develop further practice guidance
and interagency protocol in this respect.
As the DCFS letter recognises, we are
currently unable to identify cases of forced marriage from our
data on children missing education and would welcome any guidance
on how we could do this.
I hope this information is of use to you. Please
let me know if you need anything further.
20 March 2008
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