CYP Now - The contextual safeguarding debate

Local authority leaders discussed how they are using contextual safeguarding approaches to improve young people's safety outside the home, at a CYP Now debate in partnership with Servelec.

Click here to download the full debate as a PDF

Whether it is involvement in county lines drug networks, sexual exploitation, radicalisation, bullying or abuse, young people are often vulnerable to harm coming from outside their own home and family. The child protection system and its procedures however tend to focus on individual young people and their families rather than the public environments where vulnerabilities can be exploited.

To tackle this problem, Dr Carlene Firmin MBE, principal research fellow at the University of Bedfordshire, began to develop work in 2013 on safeguarding young people in different social contexts outside the home. It meant focusing on a whole-system approach to identify and mitigate risks in a young person's wider environment. The university is working with 10 sites, including around 5,000 practitioners, to test approaches to contextual safeguarding.

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