It has been lovely to get back out with you all after two years of conducting research and piloting systems change largely from our homes and desks. We have wrapped up some big projects and launched the next phase of our work, appropriately named The Next Chapter. Finalising three years of the Contextual Safeguarding Scale Up project, we held an ‘End of Programme’ event with our practice partners from across the sector (complete with workshops, poetry, and fancy dress!) before launching the Scale Up Toolkit with over 150 resources for individuals and organisations to use in their work with adolescents.
The Next Chapter picks up where Scale Up left us, aiming to resolve some outstanding legal, ethical and practice issues to help us understand more about what it means to do Contextual Safeguarding (CS) in alignment with the framework and its values. This work will allow us to pilot Risk Outside the Home Pathways (ROTH) for adolescents who experience harm beyond their families; to better understand the relationship between extra-familial harm (EFH) and education status and policy; to learn how social workers experience, and do, systems change; and to see if the CS framework can help us address inequalities when we design practice responses in collaboration with community members.
This has been a year of broadening our partnerships, leaning further into participatory and co-production approaches with young people and families, and deepening our understanding of the CS domains and values. Next year we will continue to expand and define our understanding of what it means to do CS well, with a big focus on collaboration and co-learning with the sector and young people, advancing our knowledge of ecological and systems change approaches.
Read on to hear our team members highlights, and what we’re looking forward to working on next:
Jo’s highlights
As part of the Beyond Referrals Towards Safety research we have worked with a fantastic group of youth organisations, developing a greater understanding of the crucial role universal youth work plays in creating safety for young people in relation to EFH. The research highlighted what youth work organisations do that enable, or can be a barrier, to creating safety for young people. We have developed a self-assessment resource to support youth work organisations to build safety within their organisations.
I have loved spending time reading and analysing the data from young people on their thoughts about Contextual Safeguarding. Young people shared some important points for us to grapple with going forward. For example, they raised ethical considerations related to if and how we include peers in assessments, and how young people’s safety is entwined with their right to have fun and enjoyable places to spend time. It’s been great to see how young people’s thoughts and knowledge are informing our understanding of Contextual Safeguarding and shaping our work. In the new year we will be co-working with young people to consider inequalities within system responses to EFH (Building Safety) and talking to young people who have experienced the ROTH pathway to hear their thoughts and reflections on the process. Young people’s thoughts, experiences, and knowledge will be crucial to this work and our learning going forward.
Vanessa’s highlights
This year I finished writing a chapter with our lovely colleague in Australia, Dr Sue Rayment-McHugh, for the upcoming CS book. We speak to the ongoing colonial legacies within the child protection system and begin exploring how decolonial principles can and should shape Contextual Safeguarding. I have started an ESRC funded PhD at Durham University, where I will be exploring transformative approaches to decolonising children’s social care systems. I am excited to delve into some writing to explore how Contextual Safeguarding connects with, and/or lends itself to, the work of Transformative Justice.
I am proud of these achievements, as I continue to adjust and adapt to the impacts of Long Covid in my life - supported by an amazing team all the while :)
I have really enjoyed working with the universal youth sector through the Beyond Referrals project, where we produced the Towards Safety wheel to support youth services to build safety from extra-familial harm in and around their organisations. It was inspiring to see the passion and skill youth services have to work with young people on their terms, creating safety through joy and fun!
I am very excited to support the Contextual Safeguarding Across Borders project in Aotearoa New Zealand this coming year. Not only to learn about the applicability of CS beyond a UK context; but also to learn from, and expand, the notions of Contextual Safeguarding through Aotearoa’s frameworks, and particularly through the lens of Te Ao Māori.
Molly’s highlights
The biggest change for me this year has been starting my PhD in the Sociology department, going down to one day a week with the CS team and committing to spend the next 3 and a half years working on radicalisation(!). I was lucky to spend the summer working with members of the Sociology Department on a CS in Youth Justice project, and have really enjoyed learning about the sector and applying some of what we have done in CS with enthusiastic practitioners in youth justice settings.
Our paper ‘Serious Case Reviews and Extra-Familial Harm: Missed and Emerging Opportunities to Develop Contextual Practices’ was published in the British Journal of Social Work this year, which is the first paper I have been named on (alongside Carlene and Delphine) and is one of the first projects I worked on when joining the team back in 2020, so it has a special little place in my heart!
It’s been such a pleasure meeting so many new students and staff members as I’ve begun my research training, as well as getting to know Hannah and Samantha in the Sociology Department when doing the youth justice work. I’ve had loads of opportunities to get some writing done this year which has been really enjoyable, and I’m excited to continue doing this into 2023.
I’m looking forward to getting going with my PhD research next year, and I’m excited by some of the engagement I’ve already had from local authorities who want to be involved. I am excited to take up some of the great training opportunities at Durham, including going to the NINEDTP summer school in Belfast in the summer. I’m also looking forward to continuing working on The Next Chapter project exploring risk outside the home (ROTH) conferencing and seeing what local authorities have been doing to implement this new approach.
Lauren’s highlights
2022 has been a year of launching new projects! First off, myself and Delphine launched the Contextual Safeguarding Across Borders (CSAB) study, which explores the feasibility and applicability of CS in international contexts where there are significant structural inequalities. We began by publishing our Scoping Report which identified shared areas of concern between UK settings working with adolescents who are at risk of extra-familial, and safeguarding work with refugee adolescents in Germany. After presenting this to a roundtable of key European stakeholders, we began our partnership with the International Rescue Committee who are piloting CS methods with a group of refugee girls and young women* (*inclusive). Following a successful funding bid to multiple funders we began our The Next Chapter project in July this year. I am leading the Building Safety strand where we are partnering with Bristol Council and a consortium of young people, parents, and community organisations to explore inequalities in services responses to adolescents impacted by EFH.
A highlight for me this year has been learning about, and applying, new methodologies and analytical approaches to my work. Both projects that I am leading are specifically focused on inequalities in young people’s lives, and particularly in their experiences of services. Developing my understanding of theoretical approaches like ‘social harm theory’ (or zemiology!) has really helped me to articulate the harms that young people can experience through their encounters with services. I have also had the chance to experiment with some new approaches (for me!) to writing papers and talking about safeguarding with some great people outside of the CS team, including Alex Johnson, a Transformative Justice practitioner as we developed our Radical Safeguarding training, and D Hunter with whom I wrote an autoethnographic paper on abolition and social work.
Next year I am looking forward to seeing what we learn from our partnerships with the IRC, and then Bristol Council and the consortium of community members they are working with, about how the CS framework is or can be used to tackle inequalities in adolescents’ experiences of services when they have experienced EFH. With the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act now in place, the landscape for adolescents impacted by violence is more contested (and confusing) than ever. I’m looking forward to continuing to use my research to challenge policies and practice that insist on criminalising young people for their experiences of harm in an unequal society.
Rachael’s highlights
In February we got together to celebrate the end of the Scale-Up project. Despite the cold and Covid there was an incredible energy as we reminisced about what we’ve learnt. Using prompts and props we got creative, performing poems and sketches about the challenges and joys of developing CS responses for safeguarding young people. The afternoon saw panellists and speakers share their vision for ethical and value-based work, sending us home with rejuvenated connections and heads full of ideas for where we would go next.
For me, the question that has been circling this year is - how do social workers feel about doing Contextual Safeguarding? Social workers practice has been central to Contextual Safeguarding and so it felt important to think more about what this means for the profession. Does CS help social workers practice in a way that is more aligned to social justice and ecological values? What gets in the way from doing CS, and what helps? I’ve developed these questions into a strand of The Next Chapter project. A core element of my strand has been to gather a small group of practice leaders to become co-researchers with me to answer these questions. It was a joy to meet together for the first-time last week and, despite the fact that it was our first meeting together online, we found a common sense of excitement and energy about researching what Contextual Safeguarding has to say about, and to, social work practice.
I can’t wait to carry on this work together in 2023 and hopefully meet many more social workers, as we roll out our regional workshops, reflecting together about what doing Contextual Safeguarding means for their day-to-day work.
Jenny’s highlights
2022 feels a million miles away from 2021. For some, but not all, of us we returned to meeting in person, we got to meet and hug practitioners we haven’t seen in years and generally feel the shift into more familiar ways of being. We hit some big milestones this year: the Scale-Up project which has been running for three years came to an end. In some ways this was bittersweet, our hard work was rewarded with the launch of the magnificent Scale-Up toolkit but said goodbye to some of our wonderful practitioners when we moved on to new projects. Years of sitting in my bedroom in front of the computer gave way to a spring trip to the European Social Work Research Association conference in Amsterdam and a later trip to meet with international colleagues in Tel Aviv to discuss new perspectives on child sexual exploitation. At the start of the year mine and Vanessa’s article on ‘zero tolerance’ was published alongside many others.
2022 has been a year of big highs – finding out that a practitioner used our research to stop a school exclusion brought great joy, while many of us were struck by the pain of the reports of Child Q. Stories of the loss of life of children have brought moments of despair and anger but I have continued to feel the strength and solidarity of working alongside practitioners and colleagues that continue to fight injustice.
Looking forward I am excited about the launch of our book – the collaborative endeavour of so many practitioners and researchers who have made CS possible. My new project, looking at schools and extra-familial harm, will get underway and I’m excited about more opportunities to speak and learn from those doing the work.
Carlene’s highlights
In the past year we’ve wrapped up so many big pieces of work, and launched others, and I am equally excited about both.
I was so pleased to have an opportunity to work with Michelle Lefevre and Nathalie Huegler from Sussex University, and Delphine Peace from the CS team, on a book that summarised the findings of a rapid evidence assessment into social care responses to extra-familial harm. We completed the review in 2020 as part of our work on the Innovate Project, and being able to share what we learnt in a short, open access book has been an important part in our journey of understanding what we know about effective responses to abuse beyond families, and how much more there is to understand. More broadly, it was great to continue to work with Sussex and to strengthen our relationship when I was invited to deliver a keynote at their 10-year anniversary event for the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth.
I have loved thinking through the next steps for the development of Contextual Safeguarding. In particular it has been great to see the ideas shared and developed in other countries, including our work in Germany and New Zealand; running a symposium at the ESWRA conference; delivering a keynote for the Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare, and beginning conversations with social work colleagues in Northern Ireland and the US; I am excited to be delivering talks for both countries in early 2022.
Next year I am looking forward to concluding the next phase of our pilots for Risk Outside of the Home Child Protection Conferences. Scaling up our learning from Wiltshire into three other areas in England and hearing from young people and parents who participate in this new pathway is an exciting new phase in the application of Contextual Safeguarding. I’m also excited to publish our new book on Contextual Safeguarding – edited by myself and Jenny Lloyd, and featuring contributions for all team members and others who have been on the road to Contextual Safeguarding – it is a significant step in helping us state what Contextual Safeguarding is, what it isn’t and what it could be.
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That’s all for the year. Thank you for your continued engagement with the Contextual Safeguarding programme, and we look forward to hearing from, learning together and sharing more with you in 2023.
The CS team x