We welcome everyone to our week-long learning and development week.

It’s that time of the year again when we welcome everyone to our flagship event.

Over the last two years, our world has changed, our understanding of remote working developed beyond our expectations, making the most of Teams and Zoom moved us all on by years in a very short space of time and created a virtual world for us to meet in, like today.

Clearly, we lose some important aspects, we can never fully replace in-person meetings, and we all, as a team miss meeting you all – previously it felt like a family coming together to solve the problems, but on the plus side this virtual approach allows greater reach across the UK and beyond.

Over the next few days we will share lots of links to resources, useful documents, reports and other interesting items, so keep an eye out for those on our website, our round-up of events and social media.

Please do send us any links to resources that you use that may be useful to others too, we can include them even if you are unable to attend the event.

It’s not too late to register and join us for the next 4 days and it is possible to register at any time to see the recordings for the whole week.

Our first speaker was

Ineke Houtenbos

Understanding the Impact of Racism in Practice

Ineke gave insight into how language impacted those we work with, and being conscious of what is the correct terminology, comments like “politics has gone too far now” who it is saying that reflecting and are they reflecting on their own position, was it more privileged?

We can’t know everything all the time, this often makes us feel vulnerable and mindful of getting it wrong.

The statistics presented starkly demonstrated inequality, the difference in response to boys and girls. The impact of adultification, and being mindful of conscious and unconscious bias were considered during this session.

The gaps between strategy and operational delivery were considered, what is happening on the ground and the importance of asking are we getting it right?

Catherine Bennett

Learning from the Suffolk County Lines Pathfinder

Cathryn spoke of some of the complex areas of work and the ability to consider all the localities, the importance of having a psychologist when developing planning sessions, reflecting on the whole family, not just a child’s position and the importance of looking at it through the child’s lens.

Developing a system where all the information is put together so new people to the role and those wishing to go back and reflect on some of the information is such a key to ensuring standards are maintained, we all have a continual flow of personnel that can make it difficult to keep everyone abreast of the issues and practices.

Clair Graham

Contextual Safeguarding: Birmingham Children’s Trust Approach to Localism

Clair gave an insight into a situation that forced Birmingham to look at culture and whole system approaches. Through it builds parents into the safeguarding plan and builds community trust with councils moving to a citizen-focused approach working with neighbourhoods to grow confidence.

A series of incidents changed attitudes, activating the community that allowed the LA to engage locally and begin to build trust allowing them to lead from the direction of travel and valuing their input.

Information sharing has always been a tough nut to crack, but this approach tackles some of those issues demonstrated by the growing numbers of parents and community leaders

Hannah Hill

Fearless.org – reporting crime anonymously, snitching & the bystander approach.

https://www.fearless.org/

The fearless campaign is 100% anonymous to empower young people to speak out. Specifically targeting the 11 to 24yrs age group. No personal details can be traced, no IP address, age gender address, or personal information. Their system is designed to protect the young person’s identity.

Fearless aims to break down ‘what is a crime’, and barriers to reporting crimes in a safe way for young people.

Forces work with Fearless to get some of the key messages for that area out into the locality, with spot the signs and the process to feed in concerns.

Hannah is hoping that through the NWG network we can get more of the key messages out to schools, youth clubs, and sports/activity clubs. There are some Fearless workers who are funded to deliver in some areas, but they would like to work with frontline practitioners to enable them to deliver support by promoting the social media resources.

Some key messages are ‘snitching v reporting’ and the Bystander Approach to encourage a proactive approach to disruption. challenge if it is safe to do so, distraction techniques.

The resources of 5 top tips to embed Fearless within schools, youth groups, organisations or workspaces can be found on their website.