Seen, safe and heard

Who It's For

Leaders, managers and board members in councils, housing, health and the voluntary sector

Overview

This one-day programme moves in three stages. It begins with the leader's duty: safeguarding as culture rather than compliance, one duty with two legal routes in Wales and England, and why harm so rarely announces itself. The second stage looks at what lets harm grow and what keeps concerns moving to action: closed cultures and the normalisation of deviance, board accountability and the Oxfam GB case, information sharing and learning from reviews, domestic abuse and exploitation, and speaking up after Mid Staffordshire, with Winterbourne View and Operation Jasmine read with respect for those harmed. The final stage brings an understanding of trauma: the Welsh Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the Trauma-Informed Wales framework, the cost of caring for staff, and fair involvement and payment for people with lived experience.

Aims

This programme aims to develop leaders who treat safeguarding as a daily responsibility of culture, systems, assurance and learning, keep the route from knowing to acting open, know what their board should see, and lead with an understanding of trauma that protects the people they serve and supports the staff who carry this work.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain the leader's safeguarding duty in Wales and England and why harm can be known about yet not acted on, drawing on closed cultures and review findings.
2. 2Assess the information, speaking up arrangements and partnership learning your organisation relies on to know whether safeguarding is working, rather than simply feeling reassured.
3. 3Apply trauma-informed principles to services, engagement and workforce support, including care for staff after difficult events and fair recognition of people with lived experience.

What you'll develop

By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:

1. 1Describe the leader's four jobs of culture, systems, assurance and learning, and distinguish safeguarding as compliance from safeguarding as culture.
2. 2Use data, workforce information, voice, unannounced visits and outside links to judge whether a service may be developing a closed culture.
3. 3Distinguish reassurance from assurance and set out the information your board needs to know whether safeguarding is working.
4. 4Plan how your organisation will read, test, change, check and share the learning from safeguarding reviews so that practice changes.
5. 5Apply Edmondson's three moves and the signals of healthy and unhealthy speaking up cultures to judge and strengthen psychological safety in your team.
6. 6Apply the window of tolerance and the idea that behaviour is communication to how your service responds to people, drawing on the lessons of Aberfan.
7. 7Plan how you will act before, during and after hard decisions to reduce moral injury and protect compassion satisfaction in your team.
8. 8Plan a reward and recognition policy and cost involvement into budgets from the start rather than as an afterthought.