Follow the conference on Twitter #SafeguardingYoungAdults
Find out more about virtual attendance
We are pleased to announce the National Safeguarding Adolescents and Young Adults virtual 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 COVID-19, and developing a strengths based approach to adolescent safeguarding.
The coronavirus outbreak is having an impact on everybody’s lives. Schools are closed, contact with family and friends limited and social and leisure activities cancelled…At this time, it is understandable that children and young people may be feeling anxious and upset. Their life may feel unpredictable and out of control and their usual mechanisms of support through friends, family members and professionals more limited.
A strengths-based approach explores, in a collaborative way the entire individual’s abilities and their circumstances rather than making the deficit the focus of the intervention. We should gather a holistic picture of the individual’s life.
The conference will address the need for specific services and support tailored age appropriately to adolescents and young people who are at risk of falling in the gap between child and adult services. The conference will also focus on developing an action plan for contextual safeguarding in working with adolescents.
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
• 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
• Monitor and improve service user led outcomes for safeguarding
• Understanding adolescent thinking and attachment and improve your skills in working with adolescent people
• Update your knowledge on current issues and identification of Honor Based Violence, Forced Marriage and Female Genital Mutilation
• Improve Practice Working with Vulnerable Adolescents: learning from working with people under the age of 25 who are affected by gangs and county lines activity
• 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
