Rachael Owens from the Contextual Safeguarding team has been funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to work with parents and practitioners to develop new ways for safeguarding services to work in partnerships with parents. We will join with the Ivison Trust (an organisation supporting parents of children who experience harm outside the home) and a Local Authority children’s social care department to bring together two consortia of parents and relevant professionals. One consortium will be made up of parents of adolescents and the other will consist of parents who are adolescents (‘young’ parents). The project will use participatory, arts-based methods to build connection and learn together. Our research will focus on making sure that the policy changes taking place in the child protection system (like the new Risk Outside The Home pathway for children facing extra-familial harm) are inclusive of all parents, not just those who fit into a particular definition.
The funding will support a three-year project to:
- Discover the cultural and systemic barriers preventing safeguarding services working collaboratively with parents to address the context of their lives
- Partner with parents and practitioners to imagine ways of overcoming these barriers
- Develop new ways of working through testing and piloting, including a new practice frameworks developed in participation with parents that supports practitioners to work with the context of parents’ lives (and not their parenting capacity)
- Produce an arts-based output (film, etc.) for practitioners and policy makers that promotes cultural change in terms of how practitioners engage with parents of adolescents and parents who are adolescents
- Disseminate the new ideas generated by the research to policy makers and practitioners
This project is running from April 2024 until March 2027.