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Planning and Outcomes for ROTH: toolkit

Planning and Outcomes: A Moment to Pause

So, you’ve completed a ROTH assessment, and you have a good understanding of the harm that a young person is facing. What next? You might be tempted to get going with planning what you can do to make things better, like commission an intervention here, build a partnership response there. But this is actually the time to briefly pause.

Amid all the worry and concern about the safety of the young person, there is a risk that by jumping straight into ‘doing’ mode, before having some time in ‘thinking’ mode, we lose sight of what we are actually trying to achieve and how we’ll know if we have achieved it. If we aren't clear from the start about what specifically we are trying to achieve, when it comes to reviewing whether the young person is safer later down the line it can be much harder to assess what changes have taken place and what is needed next. This is especially true for harm outside the home because it is a relatively new area of practice, meaning we can’t just reach for an off-the-shelf response.

Pausing is about having a moment to think creatively about what could create safety for the young person. It’s also the case that harm outside the home sometimes crosses over with the work of other agencies. It’s important to take a moment to pause so that what happens next is framed around social care values, i.e. meeting the contextual needs and welfare of the young person.

If you are involved in planning safeguarding responses for young people on ROTH pathways and want to know if you’re making a difference, then these tools are for you. They’ll be especially useful for ROTH Chairs but will also be good for anyone attending a ROTH conference who wants to understand the key principles and approaches behind planning responses and measuring outcomes for ROTH.

What's in this toolkit?

Use the drop-down menu below to learn about the key elements of this toolkit, then find them in the carousel at the bottom of the page.

Once your assessment is complete, turn to the Outcomes Framework for ROTH to guide your discussions about what needs to happen next. The framework supports you to pause and think, guiding you through the stages. It will help you to make sure that your ROTH pathway is in line with the domains of Contextual Safeguarding by:  

  • Guiding you to build responses that target where and how harm is happening (Domain 1)
  • Supporting you to set goals welfare principles (Domain 2)
  • Helping you to be clear on the partnership you need with young people and adults to build safety (Domain 3)
  • Ensuring that your measures and outcomes focus on a contextual understanding of safety (Domain 4)

Read this to get some examples of how to complete the framework. This example is based on the case study used in the ROTH Pathway Pilot Assessment Exemplar which can be found in our resources here.

This tool takes you through an activity that you can do alone or in a group to learn how to use the Outcomes Framework for ROTH. There are examples to match into boxes, which mirror the Outcomes Framework

This tool takes you through an activity that you can do alone or in a group to help you create plans that focus on change rather than only on effort.

Toolkit resources