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We are pleased to announce National Safeguarding Adolescents and Young Adults Conference which this year will focus on improving safeguarding practice: delivering a strengths based approach, transitional safeguarding, contextual safeguarding and complex safeguarding. Through national expert sessions and practical case studies the conference aims to bring together safeguarding leads working with adolescents and young people to understand current issues and the national context, and to debate and discuss key issues and areas you are facing in practice including supporting adolescents and young adults through and beyond COVID-19, and developing a strengths based approach to adolescent safeguarding.
“The transition between childhood and adulthood is an important developmental marker in our lives, enabling young people to try out different possibilities before making decisions… The social isolation we are all experiencing will be especially damaging to those young people leading traumatic lives with no escape valve; we need to keep this in mind as we turn our attention to post Covid. We are in danger of seeing a tidal wave of mental health issues in this cohort of children. Loneliness, lack of routine, increasing poverty levels, and living with parents struggling with their own mental health issues are causing difficulties for young people now and are likely to cause further problems in the aftermath of the pandemic… The next few months will be critical in terms of renewal and recovery for these young people.”
Lucy Butler, Executive Director of Children, Young People and Learning, West Sussex County Council February 2021
This conference will enable you to:
- Network with colleagues who are working to improve adolescent and young adult safeguarding practice
- Understand the national context of your safeguarding practice including responding to the challenges of COVID-19
- Reflect on the lived experience with a particular focus on COVID-19
- Understand how you can develop and embed a strengths based approach
- Assess various Safeguarding Models
- Understand adolescent development and risk
- Develop your skills in transitional safeguarding, contextual safeguarding and complex safeguarding and in which situations they apply
- Improve the transition from child to adult safeguarding: supporting support people across the life course
- Develop a Contextual Safeguarding action plan: understanding the wider contexts of adolescent lives outside the family
- Learn from multi-agency approaches to support child and adult victims of sexual exploitation
- Reflect on the development of a Complex Safeguarding Hub to improve the response to criminal activity, or behaviour associated to criminality, involving vulnerable children/young people, where there is exploitation and/or a clear or implied safeguarding concern
- Understanding adolescent thinking and attachment and improve your skills in working with adolescent people
- Update your knowledge on current issues and identification of risk with regard to Gangs, Criminal Exploitation and Serious Youth Violence
- Improve partnership with Police
- Legal update – including information sharing and the new Liberty Protection Safeguards which will replace DoLS and now apply to 16-17 year olds
- Self assess and reflect on your own practice
