Contextual Safeguarding helps Wiltshire to hone social work practice
Joanne Parkes
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Wiltshire County Council is developing and implementing a Contextual Safeguarding practice framework across its children’s workforce.
- Since its launch in 2019, the council reports good engagement from partners, parents and young people, and promising results for protection
- Wiltshire’s policy and practice approaches are underpinned by the framework developed by the University of Bedfordshire
ACTION
By 2015, Wiltshire County Council was already working “to some degree” with a contextual approach in response to child sexual exploitation, says the council’s service manager for young people, Andrea Brazier.
This included “some peer association mapping” by children and young people’s services, as well as looking at reducing risks linked to specific locations outside the family.
Case file audits and learning reviews were also under way “to identify where things could have been done differently to improve outcomes for young people”, she adds.
Then, after hearing about the Contextual Safeguarding work of academic Dr Carlene Firmin and her team at the University of Bedfordshire, Wiltshire’s interest was piqued in taking this further.
Following a meeting with the researchers, in 2019, Wiltshire successfully applied to become a pilot area for the university’s Contextual Safeguarding national project.
Implementation plan
Wiltshire has made a number of changes to practice already as a result of being a pilot site, and these, they say, are continually reviewed for effectiveness with the researchers.
Brazier describes this as a “learning journey” which has left the team “excited” about the changes to systems, practice and thinking.
There are “four domains” that comprise the framework drawn up by the university team and that shapes the service’s implementation plan.
It spans referral at the front door through to monitoring of outcomes and there has been progress in the following areas:
Development of specialist extra-familial harm team to work alongside existing safeguarding teams within the families and children’s service.
Multi-agency meetings address contextual risks at both operational and strategic levels and work is underway to embed these across the service.
The service is now able to map peer associations, contexts, locations across the county and identify hotspots, areas of strengths, associations of concern and support, as well as identify adults of concern or perpetrators of exploitation.
Partners, including in policing, education, health and the voluntary sector, work together on how to disrupt negative activities, target perpetrators, support positives, and strengthen contexts, locations or positive associations in order to reduce the risks these present to young people outside of their homes.
A training programme has been developed and is currently being delivered across the multi-agency partnership, to support practitioners at all levels to understand and adopt a contextual approach.
Changes to practice
Brazier says that at Level 1, work is under way to contextualise existing social work practice, for example, by including specific prompts to “consider context” during assessments.
“Where concerns around extra-familial harm are identified, practitioners are asked to complete mapping exercises as part of their assessment or review of risk, and where these meet our threshold, we bring them to our vulnerable adolescent risk management meetings (VARMMs),” explains Brazier.
“These meetings aim to address the context of harm rather than individual issues, so you may see a group referred in due to criminal or sexual exploitation concerns within that peer group or at a specific location.
“The meeting then identifies and addresses specific actions to reduce the risks to the context, making these safer for children and young people.”
At Level 2, practitioners have started to undertake context or neighbourhood assessments, according to Brazier, which then inform the risk reduction.
The service is also piloting an approach to managing young people who are at risk of significant harm due to contextual issues.
When a traditional child protection plan may not be appropriate, and there are protective parents, children will be held on contextual plans under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, with what Brazier describes as a “robust approach”.
She says: “Our intention is that this mirrors child protection planning but is adapted to suit the needs of the young person and pays specific attention to the extra-familial risks.”
The department has also trained its multi-agency safeguarding hub front door staff to identify extra-familial harm risks at the point of referral, adds Brazier. This ensures key indicators are identified as early as possible and links across groups of young people are flagged.
Systems to fit the times
Brazier explains that the service is focused not on displacing risks but combating them longer term.
This “can take time to become evident”, she says.
“We have learned that disruption alone is not the answer and a cohesive multi-agency approach is required if we’re to be successful,” she adds.
“Young people often don’t see themselves as at risk and choose not to engage, so we’re having to be creative in how we work with and engage young people and their families to explore the risks of extra-familial harm they face.
“It’s about rethinking traditional models of child protection and making the systems fit for modern day purpose and practice, rather than trying to make the children, young people and families ‘fit’ the systems.”
Looking to the future, leaders hope to embed the contextual approach across systems, so that it becomes “inherent in everything we do”, says Brazier.
“We want to ensure that young people at risk of extra-familial harm always get the right service and support at the right time, that builds on positive associations and contexts,” she adds.
Brazier would also like to see the approach gain more recognition from policymakers.
“It’s really important for us that key guidance and inspection regimes recognise the value in the approach and support organisations in adopting it,” she says.
IMPACT
Through Wiltshire’s pilot work with the university, work is ongoing on how best to demonstrate outcomes.
“We want to be able to evidence sustained positive changes to contexts, safer locations, reduced risks to young people,” says Brazier, adding that it is “a key area of focus” in the future.
In the meantime, the service reports having “successfully disrupted and targeted a number of specific locations”, through its VARMM meetings.
Child abduction warning notices and closure orders have been issued on addresses.
Support has been provided to young people in these areas to ensure issues are resolved rather than displaced, perpetrators are targeted, and the risks presented to young people are reduced.
Sessions have been offered to parents in a community setting to bring them together to understand specific exploitation risks in an area, leading them to engage with other support services.
“We have worked with police colleagues to support them to target county lines and drug networks, and they have used the service’s peer association mapping to identify perpetrators,” says Brazier.
There has also been early intervention work to identify young people “on the cusp” of more serious risk and connect with their families “to help avoid a further pull into exploitative networks”, she adds.
An injunction was also put in place against one female, following a local action plan drawn up with community groups.
The injunction “prevented her contacting a group of young people she was exploiting, as well as then looking for positive activities for the young people in the area to engage with”.
Brazier says that young people have shown good levels of engagement, particularly when the service works creatively and flexibly with them.
Parents are also better engaged “as we are moving away from the more traditional child protection approach, which can sometimes be experienced as punitive by parents”, adds Brazier.
There are other anecdotal examples of young people getting additional support, perpetrators being targeted and young people protected in a sustained way, as well as more young people accessing sexual health support.
Read more in CYP Now’s Contextual Safeguarding Special Report