Friendship and peer assessments should respect young people's rights, promote their well-being and focus on building safety (which is more than just disrupting risk). Every assessment should involve young people and their parents/ carers as active partners.
The key values that underpin Contextual Safeguarding should be at the heart of your assessment. If your assessment does not follow these, it will not be aligned with Contextual Safeguarding.
- Work with young people and families
- Prioritise involving and informing young people throughout the process
- If young people cannot be included or informed, be clear why and how you are justifying the work
- Focus on strengths, protective relationships, and opportunities for support - not only risks and concerns
- Identify how these relationships can contribute to safety and wellbeing
- Use identified strengths within safety and support plans for individuals and friendship/peer groups
- Value young people’s perspectives, even when they differ from professional views
- Create opportunities for reflection and dialogue to develop shared understanding
- Ensure conversations happen in safe, trusted relationships and spaces
- Consider who is best placed to engage young people in these discussions
- Ensure all work is guided by the child’s best interests
- Respond to harm in friendship groups as a safeguarding and welfare issue
- Respect young people’s rights to friendship and association
- Consider privacy and proportionality before recording or sharing information about young people
- Consider how schools, neighbourhoods, families and other contexts shape friendships and peer relations and experiences of harm
- Recognise that the main safeguarding concern may sit outside the group itself
- Address the wider social conditions contributing to harm, such as discrimination or exclusion
- Be prepared to shift the focus of intervention if evidence suggests another context requires a safeguarding response
- Ensure assessments are guided by care, compassion and respect for young people’s humanity
- Take time to understand young people’s needs, experiences, wishes and what matters to them
- Support access to relationships that provide emotional support, solidarity, and safety
- Recognise the importance of supportive relationships between young people, families, communities, and professionals