Central Bedfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership publish 'Isabella' Child Safeguarding Practice Review (Feb 2025)

Cross Partnership Statement

This information has been provided on behalf of Central Bedfordshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk Safeguarding Children Partnerships.

In June 2023, Isabella Wheildon tragically died. Scott Jeff has been found guilty of Isabella’s murder, and Isabella’s Mother, Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell, pleaded guilty to causing or allowing the death of a child and child cruelty.

The death of any child carries with it significant trauma. The circumstances of Isabella’s death have had an enormous impact on her family, friends, those who knew her, and professionals who worked with the family. This has been a case that has touched many people across our counties, and all the Safeguarding Partnerships involved in this statement have been truly shocked. We all offer our sincere condolences to Isabella’s family and will continue to offer support to anyone who has been affected by her death.

Given the circumstances of Isabella’s death, it was agreed that a Local Children’s Safeguarding Practice Review (LCSPR) should be commissioned. This independent review has examined multi-agency safeguarding practice prior to her death. It is important that the Partnerships and all people involved in safeguarding do all they can to learn from cases such as this. Only when we do this will we have the best opportunity to reduce the risk of similar cases occurring in the future.

The purpose of the review is to identify learning and consolidate good practice. The report from the review includes recommendations for improvement. These recommendations relate to the individual agencies involved, multi-agency practice and national issues.

All of the agencies involved accept the review findings and work is already underway to implement the recommendations. To avoid delay in implementing learning, the draft recommendations were shared with all the agencies involved and the draft report was also shared with the National Panel, the body that oversees all LCSPR's.

The Safeguarding Children’s Partnerships will work with agencies to ensure that recommendations are implemented.

Again, all the Safeguarding Partnerships send our condolences to Isabella's family and our thoughts are with all those who knew and loved her at this extremely difficult time.

Isabella CSPR (Feb 2025)