Background
Hertfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership designed and put into practice our vision for Family Safeguarding in 2015, following a successful bid to the Department for Education’s (DfE) Innovation Programme. We set out to meet the original objectives of the Children Act 1989.
The incredibly successful outcomes from the changes we made in our first year were evidenced in an evaluation report commissioned by the DfE and published in 2017. When that same year the DfE opened bids for the Wave 2 Innovation Programme, the DfE provided funding to extend the evidence base by testing whether the model could work successfully in four very different authorities. The DfE published the evaluation of this programme in 2020 and again, the model produced robust evidence of change, was liked by families and practitioners, and led to significant cost avoidance.
In 2019, The Centre for Family Safeguarding Practice was created to support further roll out of Family Safeguarding and other innovations through the Strengthening Families, Protecting Children Programme. Since then, we have also become a leading Sector Led Improvement Partner.