Helping Families – making the difference

Keeping Children Safe in Education places duties on early years settings, schools and colleges to undertake an assessment and provide community based early help to families where they “do not require a referral to statutory services but may benefit from other support”. Education is seen as best placed to identify issues as they begin to emerge and put in place the right support alongside other universal services such as health, family hubs, youth services, after school clubs and housing provision.

What does this look like for your staff and your setting?

The expectations on education settings are high, but the resources are limited and it’s crucial we make the best use of time with the families we work with. You’ll need to know your local geography, but there is a need to train and develop core assessment, relationship, intervention and evaluation skills to use your time most effectively with families. This course draws on safeguarding case reviews and research on working purposefully with families, acknowledging some of the challenges and difficulties you and your team will experience.

Our course is available to book online, or can be delivered either at your setting or online, perhaps in sections aligning with your staff meetings. 

There are six key elements to the delivery:

• Purposeful interventions – developing skills on understanding the world from the student’s perspective, creating shared goals and understanding ambivalence drawing on observations from within our records. 

Participants will…  be able to plan visits, identify effective approaches, and identify progression for students and their families over time

• Analysing risk – we will explore the elements of sound assessment activity with a strong practical focus. 

Participants will… be able to plan and undertake an holistic assessment, align risks to threshold and build on strengths with families to address areas of concern

• Productive plans – We examine how planning drives change and how practitioners can hold their hypotheses lightly. We’ll examine the value of different kinds of targets and create the right blended approach to meet the needs of the family.

Participants will… develop co-production skills to work with families towards shared goals, set clear child-centred parameters, and create strong evaluation models that help shape families’ response to intervention

• Hearing students’ voices – This crucial section will include videos and testimonies drawn from the research material (e.g. IICSA) to help participants reframe children as ‘experts in their own experience’. When we think about the impact of an assessment or plan, we should be thinking about how the child is evaluating our practice and the change around them. Children’s participation isn’t an optional extra – it is core task.

Participants will… develop key skills and an ‘intervention toolkit’ to ensure children’s voices and experiences are at the heart of their assessment and intervention work

• Partnership working – “No single practitioner can have a full picture of a child’s needs or circumstances. Everyone who comes into contact has a role to play in identifying concerns, sharing concerns and taking prompt action” (Working Together). We consider the range of people who may be involved in a family’s life and consider how assessment processes can engage with these, exploring information sharing and issues of consent, highlighting that privacy issues cannot result in safeguarding information being withheld. We draw on our courageous conversations course for some elements that help work around resistance towards a stronger partnership approach with families.

Participants will… understand the thresholds and pathways for other agencies involved in students’ lives, recognise the value of partnership working with families and develop skills towards a shared approach to meeting need

• Record keeping – We aim to shift the paradigm from additional work to complete to a valuable reflective, partnership tool. Effective record keeping provides a sound framework in which to hold and progress work with families. 

Participants will… structure their recording with a clear purpose, supported by evidence, student/family voice and analysis, and join their analysis to a plan so the document holds together. Leaders will be encouraged to think about their footprint within the record and how this impacts positively on children and young people.

Rachael Courage is a qualified social worker with over 20 years practice experience. She is an experienced trainer in child safeguarding and child protection and has managed sexual exploitation and missing services for Barnardos, including setting up services in new areas and working with Child Safeguarding Assurance Partnership around their strategic response to child sexual exploitation.

Rachael has been the safeguarding lead for the children and young people's service within a hospice and has worked for the NSPCC delivering individual and group therapeutic interventions for children who have experienced abuse.

Rachael is currently practicing as a Chair for Child Protection Conferences for a Local Authority.

This course has received excellent feedback and Rachael is recognised as a brilliant facilitator, inspiring people into confidence in the child protection arena.