Strengthening your response to harm outside the home: a collaborative, hands-on approach
Rachel Ringham and Sean Monaghan
Across the country, Safeguarding Children Partnerships face a common challenge: how to respond effectively to harm that happens beyond the family home. Harms emerging in communities, schools, and public spaces are complex, and they cannot be solved by any single service or one-size-fits-all practice model.
Resonant Collaboration and SaferNow have come together in a new collaboration to support local places to develop your response to harm affecting children and young people outside the home.
Between us, we bring decades of experience in systems change, Contextual Safeguarding, and direct practice with young people and families, alongside colleagues working in social work, policing, healthcare, housing, justice, and youth work.
If you're thinking about how to strengthen your response to harm outside the home, and want to work with people with experience in practice and strategic partnerships, who will get alongside you, we would love to start that conversation with you.
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Responding to harms outside the home
Children and young people experience harm in parks, peer groups, schools, and in the spaces between services. These harms often escape our thresholds and service categories. Contextual Safeguarding, introduced by Professor Carlene Firmin a decade ago (2015), and developed by a growing body of researchers and practitioners, offers us a way to better understand and respond to harms in those wider contexts, beyond the family home.
Yet, we have to be honest that some of our responses can make matters worse. When young people who are being harmed are treated primarily as risks to be managed or offences to be processed, we sometimes start to lose our relationship with them, and the chance to help.
Much of our safeguarding practice has been built around procedures, and making real lives more visible for assessment and quality assurance. We believe that practitioners and the young people they work with, deserve better than that.
Relationships at the heart of our response
There is an important distinction, identified by Professor Carlene Firmin and colleagues, between on the one hand, young people who are known toservices and on the other hand, those who are known by the people who work with them (2024).
Being known toservices means appearing in a file or a referral or assessment, but being known bya professional means someone has a living understanding of who that young person is: their relationships, their routines, their strengths and issues.
Too often, the richest knowledge sits with teachers, youth and community workers at the edges of the statutory system. If the wisdom stays there, the system responds to a version of the young person that is partial at best.
Process and quality do matter, and they work best in service of relationships, of genuine help and real change with young people. What we're working towards, together, are service partnerships built around relationships and learning.
Partnerships in which workers have the space to think together, to try things out, to reflect on what's actually happening, and where that learning shapes how the whole partnership works. Partnerships where we measure what matters together, including the things that are difficult to quantify.
This is a different way of thinking about public service responses to harms outside the home. The focus is on building the kind of relationships and conditions in which children, young people and families can be genuinely safer.
Supporting system alignment
A critical part of our approach is making sure the project work supports wider system alignment. Harm outside the home needs to connect into national priorities: Youth Hubs, Families First, local Prevention Partnerships. These initiatives share a common aim: getting alongside children, young people and families, building trusted relationships and offering accessible, community-based support.
By connecting harm outside the home with these initiatives, partnerships can create clearer pathways to action and repair, linking the harms young people face outside the home with services that can fully respond.
The connections come through people knowing each other, trusting each other and having worked out together how to help. This reduces the fragmentation that young people and families currently experience, where they are passed from service to service as circumstances change, and where no one really holds the full picture.
Resonant Collaboration and SaferNow
We get alongside you, we listen and we observe: to your practitioners, your frustrations, your data, and your instincts about where things are stuck. We're interested in what's already working, and in the places where your current systems feel like they're getting in the way. From there, we work together with you, thinking through the problems and building something that reflects your local reality, your relationships and your priorities.
Three conversations at the heart of this work.
They don't have to happen in order, and in practice they overlap and inform each other. Each one is significant, and tends to open up new thinking.
The first conversation: what is actually happening here?
Together, we build a shared picture of harm in your area, drawing on your data, your intelligence and the experience of people working closest to it. This includes contextual harm mapping, case learning and making sense of what your system is currently seeing and missing. Partnerships often find that this conversation alone surfaces things that have been known informally for years but never quite held together in a way that could be acted on.
The second conversation: what would a better response look like?
We work with you to develop structures and approaches that reflect your local context: a strategy, a panel model, an integrated way of working, or all three. This conversation draws on what the first conversation has surfaced, and it's shaped by the people who will actually have to make it work.
The third conversation: how do we know if things are changing?
This one runs throughout: we want to understand whether things are actually getting better for children and young people, which means honest reflection from the start. Learning as we go, rather than waiting until the end to find out. In practice, this might look like...
developing a strategy that the whole partnership owns and shapes, with clear, shared accountability for what happens next.
designing a pathway so young people don't move from service to service as the contexts around them change.
getting a clearer, more honest picture of harms in your area, so your response is shaped by what's happening rather than what the system finds easiest to record.
This kind of work only moves when the people with strategic authority decide it matters, and that means the Director of Children's Services and the Safeguarding Children Partnership Executive.
What we expect from you
We understand what sits on the desk of a senior leader in children's social care: statutory duties, inspection pressures, stretched teams, caseload demand and the weight of accountability when things go wrong. We are not asking leaders to set those things aside. We are saying that this work is relevant precisely because of them, and that some of what drives demand and risk may not shift without it. We want to be straightforward about what this work asks, because it matters. Something real, and sustained.
Dedicated time from across the partnership.
This isn't a project that can be carried by one team or one service. It requires genuine engagement from people in children's social care, health, police, justice, housing, youth work and the wider partnership, genuinely involved in thinking and deciding together.
Openness to learning.
Things will come up that are uncomfortable. Practice that isn't working, systems that are more fragmented than anyone wants to admit, tensions between services that have been easier to ignore than address. The willingness to look honestly at those things, and to learn from them rather than defend against them, is what makes this kind of work possible.
A different approach to evaluation.
We want to understand whether things are actually getting better for children and young people. That means looking beyond the number of referrals completed or strategies produced, and being willing to think differently about how we know if it's working. The evidence will sometimes be messy, relational and hard to put in a spreadsheet.
The courage to stop blaming across boundaries.
One of the most corrosive things in multi-agency work is the way blame travels: across services, disciplines, sectors and thresholds. This is understandable, as our systems are under pressure and people are trying to protect their own patch of the work. Nevertheless, blame stops learning in its tracks and halts real change.
This work asks everyone around the table to step out of that pattern and into something harder and more honest: asking together, across roles, services and sectors, what are we creating between us, and is it good enough for children and young people?
That last point takes genuine courage, and asks leaders to model something different, committing to the same children and young people, the same questions, and the same honest reckoning with what the system is and isn't doing.
This is what we mean by collective leadership.
Let’s strengthen your response to harm outside the home, together.
Partnerships that commit to this work can start where it matters most locally, shape responses that reflect their reality, build confidence and capability over time, and create change that is genuinely shared across the partnership.
This work is about strengthening your system's ability to recognise and respond to harm outside the home, so that children and young people experience greater safety, stronger and more consistent relationships with trusted adults, and more coordinated support.
Because safeguarding beyond the family home isn't something that can be delivered to you. It has to be built with you.
If you're thinking about how to strengthen your response to harm outside the home, and you want to work with people with practice and strategic partnership experience, we would love to start that conversation with you.
References
Firmin, C. (2015) Peer on peer abuse: safeguarding implications of contextualising abuse between young people within social fields: Thesis . Luton: University of Bedfordshire.
Firmin, C., Langhoff, K., Eyal-Lubling, R., Ana Maglajlic, R. and Lefevre, M. (2024) ‘“Known to services” or “Known by professionals”: Relationality at the core of trauma-informed responses to extra-familial harm’, Children and Youth Services Review, 160, p. 107595. DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.107595
