Training Topics: For Children’s Services & Youth Justice

Safety Planning: Extra Familial Harm

Perfect for any practitioner supporting vulnerable populations, this face to face workshop format enables an in-depth look at the concept of safety planning and applicable tools to use for engagement in the conversations and assessments of places of safety and places of harm.

  • Develop an understanding of what defines ‘safety’ in this context, its categorisation and how it can be assessed, applying a realism lens.

  • Develop an understanding of applying both a relationship-based and a trauma-informed lens to supporting victims of extra-familial harm in the context of safety planning.

  • Develop different tools and methodologies that can be applied to create a quality safety plan, including body mapping, place and space mapping, active and passive plans, case studies and activities.

Full Day Workshop (OCN L3 accreditation optional)

Contextual Safeguarding: In Practice

Utilising the model of Contextual Safeguarding, designed by Dr Firmin and the University of Bedfordshire. Using the tools and methods of contextual safeguarding assessments will support your ability to safeguard young people. This session explores the concept and how this can be applied.

  • Understand the concept and framework of contextual safeguarding

  • Understand why you should be at the forefront of contextual safeguarding

  • Understanding the basics of supporting young people facing extra-familial harm using this approach

  • How to ensure your concerns are raised appropriately within child protection settings

This training comes in various formats, from a three-hour webinar, to a full day’s OCN Level 3 accredited face to face workshop.

Disrupting Exploitation: A Multi-Agency Effort

This innovative part training, part workshopping session considers how everyone within the safeguarding arena plays a part in the outcomes of a child being harmed through exploitation. This session explores the tools, roles and responsibilities across multi-agency settings and what can be utilised to disrupt harm, as well as sharing innovative practices that have worked.

  • A greater understanding of tools, roles, responsibilities, and key legislation that various partners can utilise to better disrupt harms.

  • How to effectively work together as a multi-agency setting within complex safeguarding, effectively creative problem solving.

  • Understanding how to appropriately professionally challenge if responsiveness and proportionality are not adhered to.

Full Day Workshop and Two Day Versions Available

Extra-Familial Harm Safeguarding Best Practice

This training provides information on the concepts, theory and risks associated with extra-familial harms - including various forms of exploitation, trafficking and online harms. The purpose of this training is to expand the professional understanding of the many guises in which extra-familial harms present, so that we may better understanding and assess needs. From peer on peer violence, to harmful sexual behaviour, CSA/CSE, organised crime and trafficking, CSAM online, pro-ana and pro-mia sites.

  • Understand the various typologies of extra-familial harms in the community and online.

  • Understand how to support young people experiencing extra-familial harms

  • A basic understanding of legislation regarding safeguarding those at risk of or experiencing these harms

Full Day Workshop

Neurodiversity and Exploitation

Much of what is “known” about neurodivergence is generally incorrect and often harmful. This training is designed to develop a greater understanding of neurodivergence, the myths surrounding it and the appropriate language to use within practice. We then will delve into its complex and multi-faceted interconnection with exploitation, the impacts it can have on young people and explore the reasoning behind how and why neurodiverse young people are disproportionately victims of exploitation. Drawing upon these insights, we integrate best practices to formulate principles for effectively supporting and safeguarding neurodiverse young people who are at risk of exploitation or have experienced harm.

  • Have a better understanding of neurodiversity and its implications within the context of exploitation.

  • Be able to understand and identify key factors contributing to vulnerability and complexity of the safeguarding process.

  • Be able to apply an asset-based approach to address neurodiversity and exploitation, utilising prevention and disruption techniques, and integrating practical tools and organisational frameworks.

Full Day Workshop

Young People, Violence and Trauma

Develop a greater understanding of not simply what trauma is and how that trauma can impact someone, but how those impacts can play out in real-time and how to support a young person exposed. Expanding on our knowledge of the bio-psycho-social impacts to learn how we can apply what is often called trauma-informed practice into our daily work within complex and unsafe contexts young people experience.

  • Have an understanding of various typologies of trauma, from developmental to intergenerational, systemic and incident-based trauma

  • Have an understanding of how that trauma can impact as children and present in adolescence, both biological and behavioural.

  • Have an understanding of how such trauma can play out in communities, including in relation to serious youth violence

  • Have an understanding of how to practice trauma-informed and trauma-responsively

Full Day Workshop

Safety First, Desistance Later: Working with Young People Who Harm Others

All too often, practitioners find themselves balancing their work on both ensuring safety for a young person, and the risk that young person may pose to others. This webinar draws on Sean’s experiences working with young people who’s lives are at risk, but that they also pose significant risk to others.

  • Have an understanding of why young people engage in violence

  • Have an understanding of the neurological effects of violence

  • Understanding how to navigate the balance of risk management and safety interventions

Full Day Workshop

Criminal Exploitation: County Lines and Beyond

This training provides information on the concepts, theory and risks associated with criminal exploitation. Beginning, but certainly not ending with county lines, this training was designed to expand the professional understanding of the many forms of criminal exploitation, much of which has seen much less focus than county lines. Car key burglaries, deets/squares, shoplifting, cuckooing and debt bondage to name but a few.

  • Have a basic understanding of criminal exploitation and its many forms

  • Understand how to support young people experiencing criminal exploitation

  • Understanding key legislation regarding harm, exploitation and trafficking

Full Day Workshop

Trauma Informed Practice

Trauma is often the driver for behaviour, as it is embedded in the physiology of those who have experienced it.

  • Develop an understanding of the definition of trauma, it’s impacts and how trauma may present in-context.

  • Develop an understanding of Polyvagal Theory, as well as the Neurosequential Model of Theraputics - to support psychological safety, regulation and de-escalation.

  • Develop an understanding of how to support psycho-education, supporting young people to self-regulate.

Full Day Workshop

Trauma Informed Assessments, Language, Recording and Reporting

The power of language cannot be understated, whether verbal or written. Words have power that can be supportive or detrimental to the outcomes of those they are communicating about. Exploring where the power lies within words, what alternatives can be used and how we can ensure compassion in all that we do - is the overall purpose of this training

  • Understanding language and its power in safeguarding

  • Implementing TI language into our communications

  • Reframing common phrasing into TI and person centred language

Half Day Workshop

Curiosity and Hypothesising: Essential Skills for Safe Assessments

An understanding of the need to be professionally curious, and how to hypothesise effectively is absolutely key to safeguarding and supporting change. This training walks participants through various models, including Social GRAAAACES, LUUUTT Models and more, so that practical tools can be implemented into practice straight away.

  • An understanding of the need to hypothesise for safe assessments

  • Tools on hypothesising through reflective practice

  • Experience of engaging hypothesis circles of reflective practice using real case studies

Half Day Workshop

Engaging Young People and their Families in Effective Plans

Moving away from viewpoints and language such as “non-engagement” and “non-compliance/adherence to the plan,” towards critically assessing why such plans don’t always work for the young person or their family.

A plan centred on and co-designed by those the plan impacts is key to its effectiveness.

  • Understanding how to develop and facilitate co-produced plans within child and transitional safeguarding.

  • Understanding how well-informed and considered plans can support agency and not take it away.

  • Considering how plans can be formulated that consider and aim to meet everyone’s needs, not simply “obligations.”

Full Day Workshop

OTHER TRAINING OFFERS

  • Neurodiversity and offending behaviour

  • Best practice for supporting young people with neurodiversity

  • Treatment planning/therapeutic skills for complex/high risk behaviours

  • Developing therapeutic/boundaried professional relationships

  • Self-harm and suicidal behaviours in adolescence

  • Developing therapeutic/boundaried professional relationships

  • Supporting young people who are gender diverse

  • Reducing restrictive practice in healthcare/criminal justice/custody

  • Assessing risk in violent/sexually violent YP

  • Understanding and supporting adolescents who sexually offend

  • Evidence-based risk reduction

  • Effective skills for working with families

  • Understanding adolescent mental health and the mental health system

Resettlement: Safety Net Support

  • Young people who have been placed in various forms of secure estate often struggle to reintegrate and resettle upon release, as such experiences and desistance is a complex process. This training creatively supports participants to develop strategies, or “safety nets” for those soon to be, or have been released.

    • To understand the principles of safety net design and apply them to the resettlement process, considering contextual safeguarding.

    • To assess and address the needs of young people in three key areas: Navigation, Emotions, and Transitions (NET) to improve the resettlement process

    • To develop strategies for overcoming challenges and optimising the effectiveness of the resettlement process.

    Full Day Workshop