Building Rigorous Safety Plans in High-Risk Child Protection

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"Who is going to be brave enough to make the decision that a child can go home and on what basis are they making it? It’s far easier to find evidence to support the child not returning than to find evidence that a child should return home, and that’s if there is the will to work towards rehabilitation."

English Guardian-ad-Litem

Building meaningful safety plans is the hardest task in working with high-risk child protection cases. It is far easier to send parents to another course or treatment programme than to define what constitutes enough safety to close the case and/or reunify the family, but a list of services a family must attend is a service plan, not a safety plan. A meaningful safety plan involves working together with the family and their own networks to create and maintain specific changes in the family’s everyday living arrangements so everyone knows the child is safe.

This two-day workshop takes direct aim at this issue to provide participants with specific ideas, skills and processes for working with parents, children and the family’s naturally occurring network to build rigorous, sustainable safety plans that address the child protection concerns. All of the material presented in this workshop will be grounded in and demonstrated through practice examples and will include video material of professionals and parents describing their experience of the safety planning work.