Contextual Safeguarding – Child’s Chair Approach

Overview

The course aims to build confidence, clarity, and professional curiosity across practitioners and leaders, enabling them to identify, analyse, and respond effectively to safeguarding risks beyond the home using a child-centred, contextual safeguarding approach, equipping professionals to move away from incident‑based thinking towards an understanding of lived experience, from single‑agency responses to meaningful multi‑agency collaboration, and from assumption‑led practice to evidence‑informed professional curiosity

Who is Contextual Safeguarding – Child’s Chair Approach aimed at?

Children's social care practitioners and leaders

Course Length

2 days

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course delegates will be able to:-

• Apply a child‑centred approach to safeguarding by using the Child’s Chair model to understand what children see, hear, and experience in their daily lives, ensuring their voice and lived experience inform all decision‑making
• Demonstrate advanced professional curiosity by confidently questioning assumptions, recognising the impact of conscious and unconscious bias, and using structured analytical tools to support defensible safeguarding decisions
• Identify and analyse safeguarding risks beyond the family home through a contextual safeguarding lens, recognising harms across places, spaces, and people, including child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation, and online and offline grooming
• Assess the interaction between home experiences and external risks, recognising how contextual factors can increase vulnerability to exploitation and harm
• Identify early indicators of exploitation and extra‑familial harm, analyse multi‑contextual risks (home, school, peers, community, and online), and move from behaviour‑focused responses to an understanding of underlying harm and need
• Strengthen multi‑agency practice by understanding professional roles, thresholds, and information‑sharing responsibilities, and contributing confidently to strategy discussions (s47), MASH/IAA processes, and multi‑agency planning and disruption activity
• Recognise the risks to children when systems and services fail to connect, and apply learning to improve coordinated safeguarding responses
• Embed trauma‑informed and contextual thinking by understanding behaviour as communication, applying learning from serious case reviews and national data, and recognising pathways from vulnerability to exploitation
• Translate learning into practice by identifying clear, actionable changes for their role, setting, or organisation, and embedding a safeguarding culture that looks beyond the front door
• Use practical tools and frameworks, including contextual mapping and professional curiosity prompts, to ask better questions, challenge safely, and analyse safeguarding risk holistically