Contextual safeguarding: Evidencing support and innovation for young people within a case management solution

However, recognition in the Department for Education’s publication Working Together to Safeguard Children¹ and the subsequent developing practice framework for Contextual Safeguarding led by University of Bedfordshire, has validated what many of my peers have been saying for a long time - this is not something that we as social workers alone can sort out.

It is about developing community-based interventions to address community problems and through those interventions, seeking to reduce the risk to young people.

Contextualised Safeguarding Scenarios

1995: I was working as a child and family social worker with a 14-year-old girl whose relationship with her mum had broken down and she was living in the local children’s home. The worries about her safety were due to her going missing late at night, running around Earl’s Court with a friend and being brought back home in the early hours of the morning in expensive cars.

2001: I was managing a residential home for adolescents. Two of our young women were regularly going missing, being picked up by ‘friends’ who would turn up in cars and drop them back in the early hours of the morning. We held various strategy meetings with the social work teams in order to coordinate our responses. The girls were part of an identified group of young people suspected of being led into substance misuse and sexual exploitation.

2015: I was a placement commissioner. A young woman had been taken into care due to ongoing worries about her going missing and being at risk of child sexual exploitation. We were asked to ensure she would not be placed in or within easy reach of her home area. She was placed some 20 miles away in a foster placement but soon developed a regular pattern of absconding back to her home area and presenting herself to her grandmother’s house in the early hours of the morning.

Addressing the Problem

In order to better understand all of the challenges that social work teams face, we have been working with Bedfordshire University’s Contextual Safeguarding Team and the Liquidlogic DfE trailblazer local authorities. Our regular meetings have helped to establish how this practice is evolving locally, and local authorities and the university have worked with us on a specification which supports them to record these kinds of interventions in the Liquidlogic case management solution.

Here, we examine the challenges of Contextualised Safeguarding and how a case management solution can support councils to record cases effectively.

Tier 1 - The Individual Young Person

The Liquidlogic group of customers update forms locally for referrals, assessments, plans reviews and child protection conferences. This is done using the form design tool within the case management system. Using this customisation means that local authorities will be able to capture and report on young people where extra familial harm is identified and track progress throughout their intervention. It also means that they can report at an aggregate level – by showing, for example, how many referrals include contextual safeguarding concerns, how many child protection conferences considered extra-familial harm as a key factor and what were the sources of harm?

Tier 2 - Context Level

At Liquidlogic, we have been working with the trailblazer authorities to produce a specification for system enhancements. These would facilitate recording against different kinds of contexts. Enhancements are based upon evidence and findings from Liquidlogic local authority customers in partnership with Bedfordshire University.

Being able to record against a context (examples include community settings or a website) and link young people to those contexts would provide local authorities with a rich stream of intelligence about the types and locations of risk within their areas. This would also mean supporting referrals for a context, assessments, plans and reviews, and the ability to capture day to day case recording from the agencies involved in supporting the interventions.

The knowledge, experience and learning from similar functionality within the Liquidlogic Early Years & Education System (EYES) could be used where it is possible to record interventions against

establishments as well as pupils, and within the adult social care solution where it is possible to record organisational safeguarding work at an organisation level.

Towards joined-up Multi-Disciplinary Pathways

These young people do not exist exclusively within children’s social care services; many will cross over into other service boundaries such as education, SEND provision and adult social care. The unique Liquidlogic single platform across early help, social care and education means that we can go further than this.

How do you ensure that education colleagues are informed and involved when a school is referred to social care as an identified context? What about the care leaver placed with housing providers also commissioned by adult social care services, how is adult social care informed and involved?

This is the beginning of an interesting development journey with customers through which we will be seeking to explore ways of supporting practitioners across early help, social care and education to share intelligence about young people at risk of extra-familial harm and about the contexts which pose a risk to their safety and welfare.

Source: [1] Working Together to Safeguard Children. DfE; 2018, p22.

Ida Cohen is Liquidlogic’s senior consultant social worker, and has a background as a service manager in children’s social care. www.liquidlogic.co.uk​