NWG would like to thank the individuals and families who have shared their own experiences to help us produce this course.

This course is designed to ensure that their voices are heard and used to inform and influence national practice.

 Intended audience

People working directly with families or overseeing people working directly with families. Including operational and strategic staff.

• Adult and children’s social care
• Police
• youth workers
• housing

Session Overview

The aim of this short course is to encourage attendees to recognise and understand the value of the family as a safeguarding partner. Barriers to engaging the family in this role will be explored alongside practical steps that can be taken to overcome these.

Attendees will be supported to identify ways to measure the impact of the family being included as a safeguarding partner from both the familys and the professional’s perspective. The final part of the session will encourage attendees to explore how their own practice can be developed in line with national recommended best practice. 

Please note, whilst this course does provide advice on engaging families as safeguarding partners the focus is to share theory and recommended practice, not to upskill practitioners in direct parenting work. This course is focused on extra-familial harm.                              

 Session Aims and Objectives·      

• To be able to explain why families are an important safeguarding partner
• Explore in detail the impact that abuse by exploitation can have on the family and what they need from professionals to enable them to become a safeguarding partner
• Identify barriers to families being safeguarding partners and describe ways to overcome them
• Balancing outcomes to prioritise a families recovery
• Develop a personalised action plan to promote families as safeguarding partners