Safety Planning: Digging In, Getting It Done

Safety planning is the sharp end of child protection casework. To start its difficult enough for all the professionals to agree about what will satisfy them the children will be safe.

Making sure the family understand what the professionals want is the next challenge. Once these foundations are laid, the hard work really begins; an agreed, structured process has to be set in place where the family and their support people can demonstrate, over time, that they can keep their kids safe.

The practical child protection safety planning methods put forward by Andrew Turnell are becoming increasingly well known around the world. While the ideas are simple, becoming competent and confident in the detail and management of these safety-planning methods requires sustained practice and reflection over many years and many cases.

This all-new workshop will assist workers to expand their understanding and skill-set by digging into the details of safety planning, including:

• Danger statements and safety goals
• Engagement and professional positioning to enlist people who seem oppositional or ‘in denial’
• Using authority skilfully
• Dealing with secrets
• Listening for, and mapping relevant strengths and existing safety
• Involving children, particularly through the words and pictures process and safety house methods
• What does a staged reunification or a safety planning process actually look like?
• How do you get a network involved, who does what, how long should the process take?
• Pressure testing and monitoring safety plans and the people involved
• Managing risk throughout the process for the practitioner and organisation
• Building professional teams that can both support and challenge each other through the rigours and anxiety of safety planning

Participants will be sent a short questionnaire prior to the event asking them to describe the challenges and questions they would most like to see addressed. Since safety planning requires professionals to be really clear and focused, participants should come expecting to be active and work hard.

This training will be built around many new examples of safety planning work and copies of this material will be available to participants following the workshop. A major element of the training will involve participants in small groups digging into the detail of the safety planning steps required to be able to reunify a family in circumstances of neglect and physical abuse, complicated by drug use and psychosis. Participants will all receive a written copy of the danger statement, safety goals and safety process that Andrew would expect for reunification in a case of this sort.