Intro:
Welcome to the NSPCC Learning Podcast, where we share learning and expertise in child protection from inside and outside of the organisation. We aim to create debate, encourage reflection and share good practice on how we can all work together to keep babies, children and young people safe.
Shirley Maginley:
Welcome to the NSPCC Learning Podcast. I'm Shirley Maginley, one of the NSPCC's senior safeguarding consultants, and I'll be hosting this episode of the podcast which is all about the concept of contextual safeguarding.
I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Carlene Firmin, the Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding at Durham University to talk about this topic. Carlene coined the term 'contextual safeguarding' back in 2014 to describe an approach to safeguarding children that looks at additional context of harm outside of the family home and beyond the control of a child's parents and carers. Carlene, thank you so much for joining us today.
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Thank you for having me, Shirley.
Shirley Maginley:
Now, Carlene, the term has been around for a few years now, but for those who might be hearing this term 'contextual safeguarding' for the first time, or are less familiar with the concept, what exactly is contextual safeguarding?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
There's a very basic way of explaining it and a slightly more detailed one, so I'll have a go at both. In terms of the more basic way, it came about because I was reviewing cases where children had come to significant harm in contexts beyond their family homes: in their friendship groups, in their schools and in public spaces.
I found that social workers and the partnerships that they worked with largely focused on assessing their parents and them as individuals to get a sense of risk, rather than the context where the harm was actually occurring.
So contextual safeguarding, I first coined as a term, to say: if we want to respond to these types of harms like sexual and criminal exploitation or violence between young people, peer-to-peer abuse or abuse in their own relationships, we need a safeguarding response that targets the context where that harm actually occurs which is often context beyond the family; which was not at the time the focus of social work assessment and planning. That's a kind of very basic one. The actual development of it, which I'm sure we'll talk about, converted that big picture idea into a four-part framework.
So now when we use the term 'contextual safeguarding', we're talking about the four-part framework.
Shirley Maginley:
That's very good. One of the things that really stands out in contextual safeguarding is, I think, how it widens our focus beyond what's happening in that family home. And in my work with professionals across different communities, including faith communities and minoritised ethnic communities and other settings as well, I often hear people say that families are doing their very best. Yet still many don't fully understand the risk that young people face outside of their home, whether that's through peer groups or schools or community environments, and now, you know, online spaces.
So, with this in mind, why is it so important to consider these different contexts? And how did they affect children's risk of abuse?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Well, the reality is as young people grow up they spend time in many more contexts without parental supervision.
Now my children are still quite young so most of the time that I'm with them, they're either under the care of the nursery workers that we've selected or they're with me or a family member. And so the friends that they spend their time with I choose — generally the ones whose parents I get on best with — and I have quite a contained way of thinking about their safety. Even when their safety is discharged to the responsibility of people like my mum, that's in my control. I've put my child with my mum, or I've put my children in that nursery, and so the things that they may experience in those contexts also I have influence over.
Whereas when young people are growing up, they're spending more and more time in contexts where parents have far less influence. We don't choose their friends for them, we don't have much influence over what happens on the journey to and from school. We don't have as much influence in the high streets, and certainly not in the online spaces where they spend their time. And even in school, we're much less present there. We're not doing the pick-up and drop-off. We're as involved with the parents of their friends. So, parents have a really reduced level of influence. And rightly so, because that is the nature of human development.
Young people are growing up to become independent adults and so there's a natural progression there that happens. That means that we rely, as parents, on a wide network of other adults to support our young people to be safe; the adults who are in the places and spaces where they're spending their time without us. Whether that is the youth workers that them and their friends encounter when they socialise without us, or whether that's the security staff in the shopping centres, or the bus drivers that drive the buses, all of these people will to impact the safety of our young people, and so we can't rely just on parents to protect them when they are teenagers.
Shirley Maginley:
Absolutely. Before you mentioned that contextual safeguarding now has four parts. Can you just walk us through that — what they are and how they fit together?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
When we go into an organisation or a team, or even when we look at individual practice, we're looking for four things as a sign that contextual safeguarding is present.
The first thing we ask is, what is this practice targeting? The target in a contextual safeguard approach is the context where the harm happens. So we don't just see a child in context, we actively target that context. We identify it, we assess it, and we respond to it in order to change what's happening in that park or shopping centre or friendship group or school. That's the first bit.
The second bit is the legislative basis of the work and how we frame it. So, contextual safeguarding is underpinned by child protection and child welfare legislation predominantly. We are focused on safeguarding children's welfare, promoting their wellbeing, and through that therefore we're focusing on their needs first and foremost.
Often in this area, people can prioritise crime and offending and risk and forget about children's needs. In contextual safeguarding, we prioritise needs and one way to do that is to address their experiences of crime, but we can address young people's experiences of crime and leave them with unmet need — so need has to be the driving focus of the work.
The third part of the framework are the partnerships that bring it to life. Contextual safeguarding requires partnerships with young people, their families and wider communities, and with those various social actors I mentioned before who have an influence in those contexts where young people are.
So if the harm is happening at school, school leadership, pastoral care, teachers, parents at the school, other students, staff that come into the school from outside agencies — they would all be the partners in that response. Whereas if the harm was happening in a park, it might be dog walkers, parks and recreation services, waste management services that become the partners. It would vary context by context, but the partners are those that can impact the context.
And the final part of the approach is the outcomes it's pursuing. We don't just want to know if the child is any safer as a result of the response, we want to know if the park they were assaulted in is any safer, or have we taken one child out and another child has taken their place because the park remains unsafe.
So they are the four parts of the framework: the target of the context, with a focus on children's needs and welfare, in partnership with those that can influence that context, and where you measure your impact contextually.
Shirley Maginley:
That's very thorough, very thorough. It's good to have that framework in a very, you know... it cuts across a lot of different areas, but in a very simplified manner so people can understand where you start from and where you want to end up. But having a framework is one thing, making it work across different people and organisations, I would imagine is a different thing.
So, I'm interested in your thoughts around how best we can manage those different partnerships, whether it's between the agencies or the schools or the parks or the different communities. And how do you get everyone on board?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
It's definitely not an easy piece of work to do. I've recently written a paper called 'Why is common sense so complicated?' Because a lot of people think that contextual safeguarding is quite 'common sense'. You know, if a child is abused in a park, you should respond to the park. But doing that is actually quite complicated in a system that was never designed for that purpose.
So, turning that four-part framework into a reality has been a decade-long exercise up until now and will continue to be so, I'm sure, for many years ahead. Some of the things that we found useful — and we've worked with now over 90 local authorities across England, Wales and Scotland as well as a range of voluntary sector organisations and schools who are using the contextual safeguarding framework — and we found some kind of core features of practice that we see wherever people are trying to do this work.
One of the ways that they get everybody on board is through a practise that we call 'context weighting' and we have lots of resources on the contextual safeguarding website to guide people through how to do context weighting. But it is, in essence, a discussion between anyone who's involved in the response to ask "which context is the one where this child is safest and which context is where they are least safe." So, weighting the influence of different contexts.
And having those discussions at different points in the planning process really helps people get on board, particularly people who might be further away from safeguarding systems or not always understand what their role might be in providing safety. We've also found that when assessing a context, that's the best way to get people involved. So, kind of, blanket training of shopkeepers and taxi drivers and hoteliers — it's really hard for them to understand what their role could possibly be in safeguarding children.
But if you do have a concern about a young person in a public space or in a school, and you then assess that place, you have to speak to those people. We've seen surveys of residents, of business owners, shopkeepers, transport hubs, with a plan: "okay, we've got a concern about the safety of young people in this area, what do you think you could do to create safety for them or around them?" And those concrete actions can be a way of getting those wider partnerships on board and we've absolutely seen that come to life. Starting small, one context at a time, until you get a sense of what would this look like if we mainstream that across our system.
And in that process, context by time, you get those partners on board.
Shirley Maginley:
Sounds like a lot of relationship building. And yes, partnership is necessary. It's not just a nice to have, but it is absolutely needed for contextual safeguarding to have any impact and benefits.
So, it makes it even more important to understand, you know, how do you measure the progress of all of that? Do you use any particular indicators or tools in your practice to monitor the outcomes of success?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
We do use different tools and indicators to monitor the outcome of success, although I would say it's slightly challenging in the sense that we don't really have very good measures for monitoring success in our traditional child protection system; so we don't really have much to compare it to in terms of outcomes. But for contextual safeguarding, we do encourage a focus on three things when we're responding to either context or individual children who were unsafe in those contexts.
We encourage consideration of children's needs. So, what do children and young people need in that context or what does this individual child need and are those needs being met? And so a measure of success would be any increase in the ability of services to meet children and young people's needs.
In the field of extra-familial harm, we often see unmet needs in respect of access to safe education — they might have been offered an education place but they're not safe when they're there or on their journey there. A timely diagnosis in regards of neurodivergence or learning needs is often an unmet need for these children and young people. Safe time with their friends is often an unmet need. So, focusing plans around meeting children's needs is a good way of measuring success.
The second way is around a concept we call 'community guardianship' or 'guardianship capacity'. So instead of just assessing a parent's capacity to safeguard a child, we consider everybody's collective capacity to safeguard children, which includes their parents and carers, but isn't just about their parents and carers.
So, we want to measure children and young people's access to trusted adults in any context where they spend their time. And again, we don't just mean the adults we think are trusted, we mean that young people say they have access to adults that they trust. And again, if that is not present in a context where they're unsafe, then a focus should be building community guardianship in those contexts until we get to a point that young people report that they do identify adults that they trust.
The third set of measures relate to any environmental or community factors that undermine safety in any given context. Sometimes they can be quite simple things to resolve, like a lack of contact between parents of young people who are friends, and supporting greater collaboration between those parents can build safety around a friendship group. Or it may be design features in a local area that reduce visibility, or an over-surveillance of children and an under-provision of protective relationships in a locality can drive children out of areas where they should be safe and into spaces where we can't see them and where they are unsafe.
So addressing those types of issues, wider environmental factors, are also good measures of safety. You'll notice that what I'm talking about are quite qualitative measures of safety. We wouldn't consider something like a reduction in truancy a measure of safety, unless we understood the context in which truancy had reduced.
In one of the cases I reviewed early on in contextual safeguarding, a young person was truanting from school and it was the only behaviour he was displaying that raised any concerns. And so schools had been trying to manage that internally, largely using sanctions that were ineffective, until they contacted children's services and it turned out he had a sibling with a disability, and it was believed that maybe things were a bit chaotic at home and that's why he was always late and struggling to focus in school.The family said that wasn't an issue but that was the priority intervention from children's services and so that was the intervention offered.
His behaviour didn't change in school. There was then a threat to find his family for not getting him into education and he started to come in on time every day and stayed in lessons while he was there. So, a measure of effectiveness being a reduction in truancy, the most effective intervention would have been the threat to fine.
I unfortunately was called in to review his case a number of months later because he had been sexually and physically assaulted by a group of young people from his school — although the assault happened in the community — and he then said that he'd been coming in late every day because he waited for everyone to be in classrooms before he came into school. And he waited for teachers to be in those classrooms before he'd go into them. And then, if he'd needed to use the toilet during school time, he'd use the toilet in lesson time rather than at the breaktime because if he used the toilets in the breaktime, he was assaulted in the toilets.
So for him, a reduction in truancy actually meant an increase in risk. We didn't understand the context in which he was truanting and address that. So a goal would actually need to be that school was a safe place for him to be, not just that he attended. So it is really important, albeit tricky, to contextualise our outcome measures and to prioritise children's safety over and above counting numbers.
Shirley Maginley:
That's a very, very thorough approach and it's good that you have those in three different sections and parts. Thank you so much for that, because we know — you know, in my work at the NSPCC — we know that measuring impact can often be the hardest part of a project. We love to do the work that leads up to it and then we have to measure the outcome. So it's great that you have this very, very thorough approach to it.
But sometimes we know the clearest way of understanding that impact is through real life examples, and thank you so much for sharing that example with us of that young person. But do you think you might be able to give us another example, of contextual safeguarding working well in practice?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Yes, absolutely. So, we often hear in the space of extra-familial harm that one of the proposed interventions is to move children into care and often to move them a distance away from their home local authority; not because they're unsafe at home, but because they are unsafe in their local community, sometimes to secure children on welfare grounds for up to six months at a time for the same reason. And there may be occasion where that is the absolute only solution for a child. But often those interventions are put in place because people cannot think about how to build safety around that child locally and haven't thought about contextual intervention.
We've seen some changes in that respect in some local areas. In one site we were working with, there was a proposal to move five children out of a hostel — five 16- to 17-year-olds where they were living — because of concerns around criminal exploitation, and to move them into separate accommodations. They did not want to be moved and felt that if they were moved they would run away from those placements because they wanted to spend time with each other.
So, social workers used an assessment of the friendship group, and of the hostel and the surrounding area, to guide a plan. The assessment found that there was actually little to no risk within that friendship group, and actually it was a very safe group, provided emotional wellbeing to each other as well as physical safety and protection, and it would have been a risk to split them up, so advocated for them to be kept together.
Instead, funding was found to provide activities for them do safely together and for two of them to have additional specialist support in respect of drug and alcohol use. A named police officer was identified to work with the hostel around missing episodes, rather than lots of different police officers attending the provision, which was causing difficulties in the relationship between the young people and the police.
The hostel workers were supported with training, particularly around adolescent development, to understand when behaviours were an indicator of risk and where behaviours where just normal developmentally expected behaviours for young people, and to therefore be able to be much more protective adults and foster more positive relationships with the young people who were living there.
Some local business owners were also brought into the professional network, who those young people identified as people that they trusted, who could contact professionals if they had a concern about those young people, but also those young people could go to if they were out and about and felt unsafe. And then work was also done, restorative work in the professional network, because things had broken down quite a bit and there was a lot of blame between statutory agencies which was producing blockages in practice. So that combined plan was the result of the location and peer assessment, and was offered as an alternative to the distance placement which would have separated those young people from each other.
We see that type of planning all the time. That was relatively complex planning. Some more basic plans have included supporting individual children and young people back into education; restorative work with schools, social care, policing and families to build trust back in to the relationship, to allow children to attend; and particularly to increase their timetables beyond things like 45 minutes a day, where they're not excluded from school but they're also not in education for very long and so they're out and about, unsupervised, and can be exploited.
So, a range from complex to relatively simplistic planning, but all that prioritise children's needs, the development of guardianship around them and addressing any environmental or system factors that get in the way of their safety.
Shirley Maginley:
Thank you so much for sharing that. And I see, in both of those examples, keeping that child focus is so important.
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Absolutely. Contextual safeguarding really is about keeping children at the heart and one of the issues we've seen, because of the pressure on services, is often we can lose sight of what children and young people actually need from us and plans reflect much more what organisations need, rather than what children and young need.
So it is sometimes challenging to adopt contextual safeguarding because it requires a sense of humility within services to really reflect on whether what they're doing is actually helping children or whether it just makes us look like we're doing something which is better than nothing, in case something goes wrong. Those really difficult questions and discussions often sit at the heart of contextual safeguarding implementation.
Shirley Maginley:
And Carlene, just another question before we end. A lot of work we do, a lot of organisations, community organisations, youth organisations come to us because they have had direct contact with young people, and often they depend on a lot volunteers. They don't have a lot professionals around or huge funding. So what part can they play in this contextual safeguarding journey?
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Well all adults that have a relationship with children and young people can play a part in the road to contextual safeguarding, because right at the centre of it is relationships. Often they're the things that keep children and people safest, and they will be the things that are utilised when children and children are unsafe.
It's really important for voluntary sector organisations to know if they operate in areas that are adopting a contextual safeguard approach and you can normally find that out by going on the websites of local safeguarding children's partnerships — or, if you're in Wales, children's safeguarding boards — to identify whether they're doing that and therefore whether, for example, if children and young people are raising concerns to you about contexts that they're having to travel through to get to a youth club, that you can flag those contexts with your local children's services department.
We've also seen voluntary sector organisations do safety summits or safety mapping with the young people that use their services. You know, printing out maps of the local area and mapping where young people feel safe or unsafe, and using that to lobby local partners for improved responses.
I'd just say, anything that you try to do around contextual safeguarding in the early days, it's important to do it with children and young people and to collaborate with them; you're less likely to make a mistake. But also we have a range of free resources on the contextual safeguarding website to support any activities like that. As I've mentioned already we have resources on context weighting but we also have resources on safety mapping and safety summits. We have templates for policy documents and a range of other activities that you can run with volunteers on training days, and other things like that to support your ongoing learning on this topic.
Shirley Maginley:
Really helpful to know. Thank you so much. It feels like a good place to end our conversation today. Thank you so much to my guest, Professor Carlene Firmin, for joining us today.
Professor Carlene Firmin:
Thank you.
Shirley Maginley:
If you'd like to find out more about contextual safeguarding and Carlene's work, please visit the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding website, where you'll find a range of articles, toolkits, and other resources — there will be a link in the podcast shownotes below. Thank you again, Carlene, for joining us, and thank you for listening.
Outro:
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