Youth safeguarding and relational practice
One-day course for youth-facing practitioners
This one-day face-to-face professional development course is for practitioners working face-to-face with young people in youth-facing settings: arts, community, creative, education, faith, heritage, leisure, sports, voluntary, and more. This course aims to boost your knowledge, skills, and confidence in youth safeguarding and relational practice, especially regarding risks and harms experienced outside the home (EFRH).
Course context & purpose
As young people grow through adolescence (ages 10-24), they gain independence and encounter a wider range of risks and harms beyond family life. These can include violence, exploitation, peer-on-peer abuse, and radicalisation. As a practitioner, you play a crucial role in supporting young people's development while also holding significant safeguarding responsibilities.
This course helps you understand and respond effectively to the diverse risks young people face in various contexts, including those encountered in community and education settings. Our goal is to enhance your capacities, knowledge, and confidence in working directly with young people. All learning activities are practical and grounded in your everyday experiences.
Aim: to enhance your capacity to understand, identify, and respond effectively to safeguarding concerns for children and young adults within your work setting, fostering youth safety and well-being.
Objectives
By the end of this course, you'll be more confident to:
Describe adolescent development and safeguarding principles, applying them to your youth-facing practice.
Identify contexts where risk and harm occur (e.g., public spaces, online) and integrate this into your safeguarding practice in the settings where you work.
Explain youth safeguarding, including attunement and analysis, to better understand young people's lives and build rapport.
Apply youth safeguarding approaches to promote youth flourishing within your work contexts.
Nurture the agency of young people with additional needs, including neurodevelopmental differences, in your direct work.
Outline practical tools for reflection and light-touch recording of strengths, needs, risks, and harms relevant to your work activities.
Describe broader safeguarding definitions and use a strengths-based focus to explore safe spaces and positive connections for young people.
Apply light-touch methods to recognize and record the value and impact of your work with young people.