What kind of relationships are we talking about?
During adolescence, young people form all kinds of relationships outside of their family settings. They make friends, have romantic relationships and have a variety of connections with ‘peers’, i.e. people who have a common context, like classmates, members of the same sports team or people who live in the same block of flats.
We use the term ‘friendships and peer relationships’ to refer broadly to all these types of relationships, including romantic relationships, between young people. A friendship and peer assessment can cover all of these kinds of relationships, but it will look different based on the nature of the relationships between the young people involved in the assessment.
The resources in this toolkit will support you to:
- Understand what friendships and peer relationships are about in Contextual Safeguarding and key considerations before you begin
- Conduct a friends and peers assessment
- Turn your assessment into a contextual plan
- Measure the impact of Contextual Safeguarding responses
