Everybody’s Business is aimed at addressing the safeguarding needs of young people in the hospitality sector. To do this we are working with McDonald’s UK and Ireland to explore the use of Contextual Safeguarding in hospitality settings. The project is overseen by Carlene Firmin (Principal Investigator), with Project Management from Rachael Owens, and research delivered by Cait Jobson and Vicky Butterby.
This project will involve 12 months of focused activity with four McDonald's restaurants across Wales, Scotland and England. Each site will join with local partners to form satellites to support analysis and implementation, with parallel cross-project learning in Ireland and Northern Ireland. In collaboration with McDonald’s staff and customers, we will:
- scope opportunities for Contextual Safeguarding
- pilot new approaches based on what we find
- support the embedding of these across the hospitality sector in the UK
Why focus on hospitality?
Our research has highlighted that young people, as customers and staff, may encounter harm when they are in hospitality settings. As things stand, these issues are largely addressed through community safety, policing and disruption activities targeted at individuals rather than contexts. We recognise that many hospitality employees and managers are under 25, meaning that there is a need for safeguarding advice to be developmentally attuned to this reality.
We are delighted to have the opportunity in this project to work with McDonald’s to develop a new evidence base around the usefulness of a Contextual Safeguarding approach within hospitality settings.
Project aims
- Discover the cultural and systemic barriers that limit a safeguarding prevention and response to youth harm, and move away from a policing - and community-safety-led approach
- Partner with the hospitality sector and local safeguarding partnerships to imagine ways of overcoming these barriers
- Create an adolescent-sensitive culture within the hospitality sector that recognises the developmental stage of many employees and customers and recognises the implications for safeguarding
- Harness the safeguarding potential to build guardianship around larger groups of young people in and around the hospitality sector
Phase 1 of this project will run from February 2025 to February 2026