It is true to say that for the safeguarding leads (DSLs) in schools across the country their already vital and often under-resourced roles in their settings changed overnight when schools shut their doors for most students and safeguarding became the topic that everyone was talking about. KCSIE became KCSOE (keeping children safe out of education). Never has the role of the DSL and the safeguarding personnel that support them every day been so important. 

A series of Blogs published to support the sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. Edited and published by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)

In 2019 the Children’s Commissioner announced that an increasing number of young people aged 12 upwards are entering the care system for the first time due to extra-familial forms of harm. We know from the various projects that relocations are being used to address harms related to child sexual exploitation and the exploitation of young people via ‘county lines’. Yet there is little evidence on the impact of these interventions on young people’s safety, or the cost to local authorities. Our study begins to address this evidence gap. (Participating Local Authority)

ConnectFutures, Will Baldet, talks about the different definitions used within this field, based on recent history of UK radicalisation cases.

Dr Lauren Wroe and Dr Jenny Lloyd in the Contextual Safeguarding Network ask: do our interventions into extra-familial harm promote relationships of trust or relationships of surveillance?

Senior Research and Evaluation Officer, Diana Parkinson, reflects on the process of evaluating the CSA Practice Leads Programme in a social work context and how this has helped to shape our future work in this area.

The Deputy Director for Knowledge and Practice Development with the Centre for CSA highlights the importance of effective working with non-abusing parents and carers when there are concerns of intra-familial child sexual abuse.

In this blog the CSA Practice Improvement Advisor for Social Work, Jane Wiffin, reflects on what those key messages mean for the safety of children and young people and what needs to be done within the statutory child protection system to best respond when children signal or speak out about the abuse and harm they are experiencing.

The CSA Practice Improvement Advisor for multi-agency working Nick Marsh considers different approaches to safeguarding young people outside the home and highlights the importance of continuing to explicitly name and address sexual abuse within the wider safeguarding agenda.