Every year we begin with” It’s that time of the year again, to reflect and take time out for ourselves”. This year feels a little bit different, we are witnessing organisations feeling overwhelmed, with capacity at full stretch, and a sense of ‘it’s difficult to keep on top of our workloads’.

The cost of living crisis that families are facing, and charities finding it difficult to get funding to keep the doors open, means that reflecting over the past 12 months can feel that it’s been a daunting year for both managers and the practitioners doing the direct work.

But here we are again, we’ve made it through another year, it is time to take a rest, recharge our batteries and spend time with loved ones. Our health and well-being is so important to enable us to keep advocating for children and young people next year and is not always our priority.

It’s been an interesting year for the NWG Network, we are proud to support the work IICSA ChangeMakers as they continue to promote the recommendations from the final IICSA report. We were grateful to receive funding from Sport England to develop a suite of resources that allows the voices of those with lived experience to influence the development of services, safeguarding training and practice. We welcomed Kelly to our team to develop that work and thank you to the Sport England Advisory Panel for their contribution to this important piece of work.

The Bystander, Safe to Play and Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts work continues to grow. In October we ran our first in-person annual conference since Covid, which was held in Sheffield and proved that practitioners valued coming together rather than virtually meeting. One of our strengths is bringing together practitioners from all agencies for consultations and this year that work included ‘working together‘ and ‘mandatory reporting‘; bringing all those voices into the discussion to shape the submissions. Our events to highlight areas of development such as the Positions of Trust and Governance workshops are always welcomed by our network members. We also proudly launched a brand new 2-day face-to-face immersive training ‘A Legacy of Abuse‘ narrated and co-written by someone with lived experience and expanded our suite of training to include new subject matter and delivery over weekends and evenings to suit different working patterns and assist those who struggle to attend ‘regular 9 – 5 slots in accessing training.

Building on the IICSA recommendations we aim to do more around enabling the voices of lived experience to be more accessible to services that require that input in the new year.

My team, as always, have done their up most to support our network and has had input to more than 40,000 practitioners in the network in the past year through a range of methods including individual work, surgeries, observation of MACEs, case audits and much more.

Thank you for allowing us to be part of your journey to protect children and young people.

We said goodbye to trustee Rebecca who held the role of our treasurer and completed her nine-year term of office with us recently, but we were delighted to welcome two new trustees who have also been a very welcome addition to the board and offer extremely wise counsel. We thank our trustee board for their continued support for the organisation and look forward to working with them next year.

Our office will be closed from Friday 22nd December and reopen on Tuesday 2nd January and we look forward to seeing you all again in the new year.