Child protection

Worried about a child?

If you are worried about a child or a young person under the age of 19, you should contact the children and young people's service through the customer services centre. If your concern is outside of normal office hours, you should contact the emergency duty team.

In an emergency, always ring 999

All calls about concerns you may have for a child are taken seriously. Calls can be taken in confidence.

Contact details for the customer services centre and emergency duty team can be found below. For more details about the service provided by the emergency duty team, see the social care - out of hours support page.

What happens next?

Once you have contacted us, the customer services centre will take more details from you about the child and about your concerns. Experienced staff will then make a judgement on whether action needs to be taken and how quickly that action needs to be. It may not always be possible to let you know what happened because of confidentiality. Combining your information and anything already known, a decision may be taken to conduct an investigation to establish whether the child is at risk of harm or not.

If you decide that you wish to remain anonymous this will be respected. However it is helpful for the investigating social worker to be able to share your concerns openly and so we do ask callers to consider this option.

• Decide no further action is required;
• Offer the family help or advice to resolve any difficulties; or
• Call a meeting to decide what further steps should be taken. This meeting is known as an initial child protection conference. It is held whenever there is good reason to be concerned that a child may have been abused, or is in some way at risk of being harmed.  

You can find out more by downloading the leaflets below.