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Tools to Support a Neighbourhood Assessment

A range of tools to help you scope a neighbourhood context to support your assessment.

The start of your assessment is all about learning who lives, works or spends time in the neighbourhood in question, and speaking to those people. As you engage these people you will learn more about the social dynamics of the context you’re assessing and build a picture of how much young people have access to safe adults who like them and care about them. Through this process you will hopefully meet people who could be part of a safeguarding response – not everyone will want to be involved, but some will and the tools we’ve developed will help you engage people and build a picture of the local resources.  

Before you begin, remember that scoping out a new neighbourhood can be unpredictable and doesn’t always run as smoothly as you might hope it would.

If you want to find out how young people are spending time in an area and how the physical environment and other factors might be impacting their safety, you can conduct an observation. Doing the observation might create opportunities to engage people who could later be part of a safeguarding response. Watch the video in the Related Resources carousel below on how to conduct neighbourhood observations. 

If you want to find out what residents, business owners and others in the neighbourhood think about the safety of young people, you can run a survey and use the information to inform the safety plan. Examples of residents and business surveys are also in the Related Resources below.  

If you want to understand where young people feel safe or unsafe in a particular neighbourhood, who they have good relationships with and how this can be strengthened, you can undertake an activity called ‘safety mapping’ – there is a link in the Related Resources below to help you with this.

Another option is to conduct a survey with young people. This is a more formal way of finding out what young people think about the safety of a neighbourhood. It's important to think about where young people feel happiest and safest sharing their experiences of safety and harm – for example, would they rather speak to you in a group or fill out an anonymous survey? 

Also in the Related Resources below, there's an example of a survey for young people, and a link to a toolkit for consulting with young people.

Related resources