Contextual Safeguarding at Kent County Council.

Kent County Council is one of the nine pilot sites which embarked upon its Contextual Safeguarding project with University of Bedfordshire in 2019. The project is divided into three phases: create, test, and embed.

Speaking about the project, Katherine Atkinson, Assistant Director – Management Information & Intelligence says:

“The Scale-Up project that we are part of (one of nine local authorities) is a three-year programme, which will conclude with Contextual Safeguarding embedded within practice across our children’s workforce. To support this, we are planning the effective recording and monitoring of this work within our Liquidlogic case management system. Work began in 2019 with the support and guidance of University of Bedfordshire, which conducted a systems review, looking at threshold application, system mapping, and identifying opportunities. Since then, we have conducted a number of pilots to test our approaches and shape our thinking, and we are building knowledge and understanding of Contextual Safeguarding across our local partnerships.

“A key component of the project is the ability to record Contextual Safeguarding cases within our case management system. With this in mind, Liquidlogic initially reviewed the toolkit produced by the pilot sites and held a series of workshops to determine priorities from which a specification was produced. Our approach to all social work recording is that the system must support practice and decision making to improve outcomes for children and young people. This approach is also fundamental with Contextual Safeguarding cases. Working with Liquidlogic, other pilot sites, and University of Bedfordshire means that we will be able to do this.”