Scoping your assessment
Key people that can help you inform your assessment are:
- Young people
It’s essential that you talk to young people about their relationships. You could use the Safety Mapping and All Around Me tools with them to prompt discussions about how they understand safety (see related resources below).
- Parents and carers
They should be supported to engage with the assessment process and engaged in discussions around their child’s friendship/ peer relationships. The plan may consider support for parents.
- Professionals
People that engage with the friendship group in schools and public settings, such as youth workers, often have a good relationship with young people and can provide valuable insights.
You should also gather information about the nature of locations where young people spend time. You might consider doing an observation of a community area where you know the group gets together. Watch the video in the related resources carousel below on how to conduct neighbourhood observations.
Writing your assessment
The best approach is to work through the prompts in the friendship and peer assessment form using the information you gather through your scoping to complete each section. You’ll then need to step back and reflect on what needs to happen for this group to enhance the safety of young people. We recommend doing this in partnership with others, in reflective discussion, so that you have the benefit of several perspectives. You may want to use the Context Weighting tool (see below) to help you to organise your findings from the assessment and decide what is the greatest influence on harm. Finally, it will help to write this up succinctly so that your completed assessment supports you to clearly see what the issues are and develop a plan to address them.
In the carousel below there is an exemplar of a completed friendship and peer assessment form to give you an idea of how to write this up, in addition to a range of tools to help you.
