NWG Newsletter – June 2020

In this issue: 

• Exploitation and Transition
• Education and Communities
• Sports and Activities
• Prevention and Disruption
• Membership 

Education and Communities / Exploitation and Transition – Steve Baguley [email protected]

Throughout the lockdown the NWG has been in contact with a number of areas from across the country sharing practice and key learning. The work has mainly been focused on responses to lockdown, changes in patterns of exploitation and key learning to inform plans for recovery.

Along with a number of Charities we have worked together to develop a brief report titled the Recovery Plan Safeguarding and Child Protection. This was presented to a cross government departmental meeting on the 8th July and was well received. The report will be available on the NWG website. Thank you to the Children’s Society for leading on the report and working to some tight timescales.

The NWG work on Exploitation and the Transition into Adulthood continues. Thank you to East Ridings for sending through their summary report of a recent workshop on this issue. This has been shared with the NWG Electronic Transition into Adulthood group. We are also receiving requests from both children and adult services for support in improving local responses to exploitation and the transition into adulthood. We have received some very positive feedback in our work in this area.

“Thank you again for your time today. All the support and resources you have been providing have been invaluable and it has definitely fostered a personal interest for me in transitional safeguarding. I have asked my line manager if we can sign up to be Gold members but either way, I might look into becoming an individual gold member as it looks like you have lots of great resources and training.”

The Missing Benchmarking Tool that we are developing with the Children’s Society is progressing well. We recently had a small workshop to get feedback on the draft so far. We received a number of very helpful comments/suggestions and the group were very positive about the workshop and on the potential of the tool. Below are a couple examples of the feedback that we received.

“Just want to thank you for letting me know about the joint work between NWG and Children’s Society. It was a good discussion and really like how this will assist me with shaping our misper policy.”-Focus group Participant.

“Really great work and I would use the questions to scrutinise our work and has given me so much food for thought.” Focus group participant.

We are now in the process of updating the tool with the feedback from the workshop and we will then make it available for a wider consultation and pilot the tool in a small number of areas later in the year. Special thanks the Children’s Society who continues to drive the development of the tool.

Our partnership work with the Marie Collins Foundation (MCF) goes from strength to strength. We have been working on two online sexual harm reduction guides one for professionals and another for parents. Both are now in the design stage and should be ready within the next few weeks.

We are involved in the collaboration between the NWG and MCF regarding children and partners of offenders who are arrested for indecent images of children (IIOC) offences. This work is progressing well with the formation of a jointly chaired operational group between The NWG and MCF.

Sports and Activities – Kevin Murphy [email protected]

Although much of the sports world is still effectively in lockdown the focus on safeguarding continues.

Two articles have been published on our website , one features advice and guidance for parents who may be looking for their children to attend summer holiday sports and activities play schemes particularly with Covid 19 restrictions in place and the other is specifically about safeguarding in sport  highlighting key points from the recent Netflix documentary into the abuse that children suffered whilst in the USA Gymnastics teams and the latest report from the Truth Project from the IICSA again which is specific to sport.

The Safe to Play campaign launch has been postponed, however contact with all of our key partners continues as we actively plan for the launch hopefully later in the year.

Collaboration with our safeguarding partners funded by Sport England continues, we are supporting Lime Culture with their development of their new designated safeguarding lead training.

Regular meetings are taking place with Sport England, the Ann Craft Trust and the CPSU to help plan for the return to sport.

We also participated in a research project being conducted by an Oxford university student into abuse in football.

Prevention and Disruption – Kay Wallace [email protected]

Throughout this month we have continued to engage with areas across the country in order to understand their initial response to COVID-19, practice they have developed during the lockdown period and practice they propose to continue using now lockdown is being eased. An interesting phrase one area shared was ‘whilst the virtual attendance at meetings may have improved has engagement by participants at the meetings improved…whilst business responses to an issue can be achieved virtually, to achieve innovation personal contact is needed’.

We have continued to work on the project regarding children and partners of offenders who are arrested for indecent images of children (IIOC) offences and developed three info-graphs with the two ex- partners of offenders who were arrested and convicted of IIOC offences, who raised the concern around the lack of support by agencies for the children and partners during the investigation process. The info- graphs cover; information for the partner – around the investigation, information for the partner regarding caring for their children and themselves and information for the police regarding the impact the investigation will have on the family of the perpetrator.  Additionally a working group is being developed by Sheila Taylor from The NWG and Tink Palmer from the Marie Collins Foundation, to address the issues raised for children and partners of online offenders, and Chief Constable Simon Bailey is arranging a meeting in August with organisational leads from statutory and voluntary agencies to ensure a consistent response to the online issues raised.

Feedback for the NWG and Children’s Society missing benchmarking tool from a police perspective has been provided.

We have continued to work on the Cesium project, an INNOVATE funded 14- month project with Trilateral Research, The NWG and Lincolnshire Police. The project aims to utilise cutting-edge machine learning techniques to identify children and locations most at risk of CE, as well as those most likely to perpetrate CE, both now and in the future in order to reduce harm and support the effective deployment and commissioning of safeguarding resources. The third data drop of the tool took place this month and the project is on track to achieve its objectives.

Families and Communities – Maria Cassidy [email protected]

We have been in touch with several key partners to find out how their work has been adapting post covid around parents and families

Work is continuing on the benchmarking tool around widening exploitation and now needs to be amended to include post Covid learning.  The whole operation team will input into this to ensure we are reflecting the current picture.

Work has started to look at how we can move forward on youth participation beginning with collecting and reviewing our resources on our website.

NWG attended the Birmingham CCG Contextual safeguarding health event. The NWG presented at the last event and we plan to share the disruption tool next time.

The work with Marie Collins Foundation regarding the families’ resource is ongoing.

Membership Cheryl Stevens [email protected]

Membership: 

You can download our ‘offer’ leaflet from the resource section of the website https://www.nwgnetwork.org/resources/ and search NWG Offer 2020

The introduction of a trial membership has been extended and is currently being offered to new sign-ups for a 3 month period.

To join please click on the ‘Login Icon’ in the header of the website https://www.nwgnetwork.org/:

Then ‘Create a New Account’.

and ‘Register For an Account’ – Individual account (please note individual accounts ONLY support PERSONAL email addresses 

Fill in your details and create a password.

• In the Company/Product Description’ area please can you start the message with the code: COVID-19 (without this code we will not be able to activate your membership)

• Select ‘Individual – £25 per year’ and “phone’ for payment type then ‘Register’ (Please note that you won’t be charged for signing up and we will send you a note at the end of June to ask if you would like to continue – we won’t automatically charge you).

Once your application shows in our system we will activate the account.

Please note that this is an individual membership and login details and passwords must not be shared as per our membership T’s & C’s

Surgeries

Our virtual surgeries continue to run once a week and are popular with members.  Surgeries offer members the opportunity to discuss challenges, barriers and casework discussions where the whole team can input and offer support and advice.

Some feedback from surgeries are:

“It (the surgery) provides an excellent platform for practitioners to have safe discussions about practice and difficult cases which enables reflective practice and professional perspective from a different angle”

“It helps to talk through cases with workers who share the same passion to safeguard, who want to offer practical and meaningful support and guidance. It also helps to have support from ‘experts’ within a field who can share their knowledge and understanding and as a result the response feels powerful and enables a worker to feel empowered from a position of feeling stuck and frustrated “

Please contact Maria or Cheryl if you wish to book a surgery place for you and/or your team

Online Learning Events

Two learning events have been hosted in June , with summaries and podcasts available to members.

They are:

• Alex Bridge – Southampton – Southend on Sea Public Health Model to Address Child Exploitation (NWG Award Winner 2020)
• Dr Warren Larkin – ‘Supporting and Safeguarding exploited people in the context of Covid 19 lockdown and beyond

More events are planned