Piloting the CSA Practice Leads Programme in social work: an evaluation

We have developed a 10 month training and development programme to build practitioners’ understanding and confidence in identifying and responding to CSA, and support them to cascade their learning within their services. Today we are pleased to publish a report evaluating a pilot of this programme in local authority children’s services.

This evaluation report provides strong evidence of the programme’s quality and value in enabling local authorities to improve their identification and response to concerns around CSA. 

Improving the social work response to child sexual abuse is essential both in terms of reducing the long term impact of abuse on individuals and their families, but also on public services and society as a whole.

By establishing an evidence-informed understanding of CSA and offending amongst social workers, team managers and early help services, we can increase safe, confident, competent and proportionate responses to such cases.

Child sexual abuse in the context of Covid-19

Practitioners with responsibility for safeguarding children are facing unprecedented challenges and that this is a time of great stress and upheaval. We want to thank all of those working with and for children for their commitment.

Identifying and responding to concerns of sexual abuse is even more difficult as we grapple with staffing capacity constraints, restrictions on how we practice. We have collated some key evidence-based resources for practitioners, commissioners and policymakers working to identify, prevent and respond to child sexual abuse, including our Key messages from research on identifying and responding to disclosures of CSA paper.

However, if you have a particular question or concern in relation to how we can best protect children during this challenging time, please get in touch by emailing [email protected]; briefly let us know the issue you are facing and we will come back to you as soon as possible, and in no longer than 3 working days.

PhD student workshop

Last week we hosted an online workshop for PhD students researching CSA and the multi-agency response. Participants shared findings on themes including CSA imagery amongst adolescents, interventions for harmful sexual behaviour and analysing social care responses.

It was great to hear about the work students are undertaking and help them build a support network. Participants also engaged in sessions on researcher welfare and overcoming challenges in research led by Dr Helen Beckett and Prof Liz Kelly.