Free Resources

Effective contextual safeguarding requires a comprehensive understanding of the contexts that children and young people move in. These twenty questions are designed to support practitioners to consider and explore different contexts from a variety of perspectives, ensuring that the information and understanding that they gain can be used to promote and develop safety using a contextual safeguarding lens.

These twenty questions are designed for practitioners to use in order to get a better understanding from the child/ young person's perspective about the contexts that they move within. With a better understanding of spaces and places, practitioners are better able to support children/young people to develop effective, robust safety plans and encourage a more contextual approach to how we take collective responsibility for safeguarding in our communities.

At SaferNow we are committed to promoting effective, young person centred safety plans. This guidance is designed for practitioners and aims to develop skills and build confidence ensuring that the safety plans agreed are practical and promote wellbeing.

Body Scanning Body scanning is an exceptionally useful psycho-education tool. By helping young people understand what their body is telling them how they feel, we can better support them to develop self regulation skills. This tool can be a worksheet, but you might like to consider drawing around the young person on a large piece of paper (a creative session that works particularly well for younger children).

As a social care practitioner, risk assessments are often part of our daily work. This can make the risks that we are trying to mitigate feel overwhelming. This risk assessment tool helps us plot the likelihood of something happening, alongside the severity of the impact if it did happen. This allows us to prioritise our responses to focus on the risks that cause the highest level of harm.

This resource is an easy, interactive way of creating productive discussions with young people, specifically on how they feel about different areas of their life. It is a productive way of identifying areas that the young person might want support in, as well as a reflective tool for evidencing distance travelled and progress made. You can use information gained from this resource to praise the young person in an evidence based way, and encourage them to reflect positively on their progress. It is also a great tool for informing reports and intervention plans.

This easy to use resource empowers practitioners to explore a young person's understanding of risk. A shared understanding of risk is vital to the effectiveness of any form of risk management for young people. Our advice is to start the conversation using general topics. For example, ask questions like, 'would you swim with sharks', before focusing on risks that are more relevant to that young person.

This tool enables practitioners to support young people in making connections between how they think, feel and behave. This increased level of self-understanding can be built upon to help young people to understand the impact their feelings have on their behaviours and develop self-regulation skills. Self-regulation skills and self-awareness gives our young people vital tools to manage their own behaviours and navigate their interactions with others.

This versatile tool allows practitioners to facilitate a young person-led session, which improves our understanding of their lives, from their perspective. You can map out people in the young person's life and how they view their relationships with them. Creativity often helps encourage a positive discussion with the young person; this tool holds scope for creative and dynamic sessions. For example, using paper, Post-it notes, or meaningful items to represent people. From a practitioner perspective, this tool is fantastic for ensuring we understand the young person's perspective and are not clouded by our own expectations and biases.

This flexible tool can be used by practitioners with young people, or with each other, if the young people are reluctant to engage. It gives us a better understanding of the dynamics and interactions between young people when an incident has taken place. A stronger understanding of an incident and the individuals involved enables us to better reduce the risk of further harm occurring. You can also use this tool to identify existing and previous strengths, which can be built upon to reduce future harm.