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Planning for Safety: Embedding Risk Outside of the Home (ROTH) Pathways

When young people are at risk of significant harm in peer, school or community contexts, and that harm isn’t attributable to their parent or caregiver, how should social workers coordinate plans that keep them safe?

Since 2019 the Contextual Safeguarding team has worked with children’s social care departments to design, test, and document the development of ‘Risk Outside of the Home’ (ROTH) child protection pathways. ROTH Pathways are intended to offer a structure, and through their implementation contribute to a culture, in which it is possible to offer child protection responses when young people are at risk of significant extra-familial harm.

Why develop ROTH Pathways?

Situations where extra-familial harm poses risks that are ‘significant’ are, in theory, a child protection matter – as defined by s.47 of the Children Act 1989. However, in practice, and reflected in statutory guidance, child protection procedures have often focused on changing the behaviour of parents/caregivers to keep young people safe. Information is shared about young people and their parents to build child protection plans, the harm a young person experiences is often categorised in relation to parenting, and plans require parents/caregivers to undertake actions that increase safety for their young person.

As a result, if the harm a young person experiences is significant but not associated to what a parent/caregiver is doing, or not doing, people have debated the suitability of existing child protection procedures. On one hand child protection procedures aren’t appropriate – as they are often focused on changing the actions of parents as a source of protection instead of changing peer, school, and community contexts where this type of harm occurs. On the other hand, child protection procedures offer a point of escalation and increased oversight, communicating to partner agencies, young people, and families that the harm a young person is facing is significant, and that a plan must be resourced and implemented in response.

In 2019 we articulated the risks of this gap in local systems and began piloting an alternative pathway. The need for a s.47 pathway has since been recommended in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and the Jay Inquiry into Child Criminal Exploitation.

What does the Planning for Safety project involve?

The Planning for Safety project involves ongoing testing and development of ROTH Pathways across four local areas in England. We use a combination of: observations; reviews of plans, assessments and policies; focus groups; interviews with young people, parents/carers and professionals; and also development workshops to continue to understand the opportunities and challenges of ROTH pathways and the local and national conditions that would best facilitate their implementation across England.

Current questions we are exploring are:

1. How are the extra-familial contexts/factors identified through ROTH pathway being addressed by plans?

2. To what extent can traditional child protection pathways consider extra-familial contexts while also addressing challenges within families?  

3. To what extent does the answer to the above suggest that ROTH and traditional child protection pathways could merge in the future?

4.  In what ways are sites able to embed principles of ROTH within wider structures in children’s social care, such as early help and services for children in care, and beyond social care, such as community safety partnerships?

The Principal Investigator for this project is Carlene Firmin and the research assistant is Molly Manister.

Lauren Wroe, Rachael Owens and Jenny Lloyd are also contributing specialist knowledge to aid the development of ROTH Pathways in respect of commissioning and responses (Lauren), outcomes measurement and partnership with parents (Rachael) and engagement with schools (Jenny).

Planning for Safety is funded by the Department for Education and the Maria Marina foundation.

 
ROTH resources