Contextual Safeguarding On A Global Platform
In this blog, Professor Carlene Firmin (pictured), Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding (GCCS), welcomes in an exciting new era and sets out the plans and expectations she and the GCCS team have for the Centre as it grows and evolves.
I still find it strange when I see ‘Contextual Safeguarding’ in the title of people’s jobs, organisational teams, partnership conferences or system policies. I coined the term back in 2015 as I revised my doctoral thesis (based on helpful feedback from one of my examiners, Professor Simon Hackett) and when I was still under the impression that only my supervisors and examiners would ever read it; so 10 years on I’m still not used to seeing it as part of the child-protection lexicon.
And yet here we are; it’s now 2025 and the Contextual Safeguarding research programme is now a research centre - the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding (GCCS) to be exact. The launch of the GCCS is a pivotal moment for many of us who have developed, tested, scaled and refined Contextual Safeguarding over the last decade.
On a practical level, the investment from Durham University to give us Centre status gives my team and me the infrastructure and capacity that we need to reach our full potential. This includes being able to be responsive to requests for short-term consultative support or service evaluation, as well as offer tiered continued professional development (CPD) opportunities to the organisations with whom we work, right through to launching the world’s first Postgraduate Certificate in Contextual Safeguarding and formalising academic and practice partnerships to scale testing across countries and industries.
In terms of knowledge, we are now an interdisciplinary team, bringing together education, social enterprise, law, sociology, social work, criminology, theology and sports scholars to document and support the multi-agency adoption of Contextual Safeguarding. We are also able to grow knowledge leaders, recruiting research assistants and assistant professors, and launching PhD scholarships on Contextual Safeguarding in hospitality, sports, the Catholic Church and for care-experienced scholars in our first year alone; and next year will be recruiting fellows to join our team as well. Through these opportunities we plan to open doors into research for those too often under-represented in the academy, increasing the presence of practitioner-researchers, lived-experience researchers, and minoritised researchers in our centre team.
Our implementation partnerships will also be strengthened through our Centre status. Many organisations and individuals have participated in networks, advisory panels and collectives attached to our research programme. Over the coming months we will restructure our governance arrangements, creating opportunities for cross-sector dialogue, and increasing the engagement of health, education, justice and youth work sectors in these arrangements - alongside our already established social work and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCS) networks. We will rebuild our academics’ network, including with representation from new university partners across the UK nations, Chile, Australia, and the Netherlands among others. And over four years we will incubate the first ever multi-agency practice hub for Contextual Safeguarding. We look forward to working across these networks to build international policy and practice frameworks that are structurally and culturally able to truly rewrite the rules of child protection.
So please make sure you are signed up to the GCCS Newsletter, and following our new Instagram (@gccsdurham) and LinkedIn (GCCS Durham) accounts to keep updated on all the opportunities there will be to work with us. And to register your interest in forthcoming CPD and PG Cert opportunities please click on this link.