Innovation in children’s social care: Contextual Safeguarding, Trauma-informed Practice and Transitional Safeguarding

The Innovate Project is a four year study exploring how social care and other safeguarding agencies are innovating to address the extra-familial risks and/or harms that young people may encounter and experience beyond the family home.

The project has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council between 2019 and 2023. Our view was that understanding more about what happens during innovation, when, how and why is best done in context, so we have studied situated innovation over time as it happened in six local authorities, inter-agency safeguarding networks and voluntary and community sector organisations.

How can innovation be effectively facilitated in children’s social care and tailored to local contexts?

An upcoming series of open access webinars will explore learning from the Innovate Project, exploring how to effectively support innovation and tailor new approaches to your local context.

Learning more about the processes of innovation in social care has been the focus of the Innovate Project. The project has studied the introduction of new professional responses to extra-familial risks and harms that young people experience and encounter beyond the family home in six different pilot sites, focusing on:

• Contextual Safeguarding
• Trauma-informed practice
• Transitional Safeguarding.

By following the ups and downs of innovation journeys, we were able to understand how decisions were made and their effects; the important role played by interactive dynamics of risk, power and relationships; and what system capabilities were needed to enable innovation to flourish and sustain. We have also learned more about what other organisations might need to take into account when seeking to implement one of these three approaches.

Sharing learning from the Innovate Project

Our forthcoming series of open access webinars in association with Research in Practice marks an important moment when we can share our key findings with those commissioning and leading innovation and respond to the questions that are raised about what is important to consider when tailoring these new practice and system approaches to a local context.

You can attend all the webinars in the series or just one of them.

Open access resources from the Innovate Project

The Innovate Project has freely available resources for organisations to use when developing innovate practice. These include:

• A paper mapping the stages of innovation in children’s social care which has an accompanying infographic to enable organisations’ planning and review at each stage.  
• A paper on the importance of ethical innovation in children’s social care with a related tool to help those leading and implementing innovation to ensure their practice and service innovations are ethically appropriate as well as practically feasible.
• A book ‘Safeguarding Young People beyond the Family Home’, which highlights key areas for service development in the field of extra-familial risks and harms, and can be downloaded for free.

To receive regular updates and early notification of new events, email info@theinnovateproject.co.uk. More books and papers are being written and, in the autumn, we will be holding an in-person conference which drills further down into issues of implementation during workshops. Over this summer, we’ll be holding webinars with practice and academic colleagues in other countries to learn more about the relevance of our findings for other geographic, cultural and legal contexts.

By sharing key learning from the project, we hope to increase understanding about the processes of innovation in social care, including the barriers and levers, and what system capabilities are needed to allow innovation to flourish and sustain over time.