About family safeguarding
Including a guide to Hertfordshire's family safeguarding model.Our improvement and support offerContact us and latest news
The Centre for Family Safeguarding Practice was established in 2019, with the aim of becoming a centre of excellence to promote Hertfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership’s groundbreaking model of multi-agency, whole family help, support, and protection. We are a small team with experience of providing effective children’s services improvement support, and in implementing the Family Safeguarding model in a wide range of different areas around the country. We have significant expertise, and have developed a suite of training, financial, recruitment and mentoring materials, to help partnerships to adopt our approach. We aim to change how we ‘do’ family help and multi-agency child protection with families in England, so that we achieve our vision of keeping many more children safely in their families.
Since our initial inception we have enhanced our offer of support for local authorities and their safeguarding partnerships to provide wide-ranging support across all of children’s services, from ‘front door’ services, to early help, child in need and child protection services, cared for children, children returning home, quality assurance, and learning and development. Whether you need help with an individual service, or whole system transformation, we welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can help your multi-agency partnership. We are an established Sector Led Improvement Partner and have significant experience in helping partnerships to transform their culture and practice to that envisaged in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, and Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive.
Research tells us that factors that may increase the likelihood of harm to children include parental drug and alcohol use, poor mental health, and abuse and violence in parental relationships. In Family Safeguarding, instead of children’s Social Workers alone, we work as a multi-disciplinary team that includes domestic abuse, mental health, and substance misuse specialists to work with adults. We share information and make decisions together. We make it as easy as possible for parents to get help and support to make a difference to their children. We all use Motivational Interviewing practice, which embodies the values and beliefs that our professions promote.
We know that to keep more children safely in their families, we have to change our attitudes to families; to create a culture based on seeing every family as deserving of help and support, not as people deliberately setting out to harm their children. We support multi-agency practitioners to become skilled at creating change in families, not experts in operating processes.
To find out more about what we offer, please follow the links above, and we can be contacted via the link below.