Keeping people safe

Who It's For

Leaders, managers and board members who carry safeguarding responsibility in Wales or England

Overview

This half-day programme brings together all nine modules of the topic. It opens with responsibility and the law: the leader's four jobs, and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 alongside England's Care Act 2014. It then turns to recognition, from why harm goes unseen and professional curiosity to closed cultures and Diane Vaughan's normalisation of deviance. The third stage covers accountability and partnership: what a board should see after the Oxfam GB Haiti case, information sharing, learning from reviews, and domestic abuse and exploitation. Finally it explores speaking up, from Mid Staffordshire to psychological safety, and closes with a capstone that reflects carefully on Winterbourne View, Operation Jasmine in South East Wales and the national review following the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

Aims

This programme aims to develop leaders who treat safeguarding as a core leadership responsibility: understanding the law in Wales and England, creating conditions in which harm is noticed and acted on, holding boards to real assurance, and sustaining cultures in which people feel safe to speak.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain how safeguarding duties differ between Wales and England and apply person-led practice and the reasonable cause to suspect threshold in your service.
2. 2Diagnose the conditions that make harm easier or harder to see, from closed culture warning signs to weak information sharing and silenced concerns.
3. 3Lead safeguarding governance that distinguishes assurance from reassurance, learns from reviews and real cases, and keeps the route from knowing to acting open.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Apply the six-stage safeguarding cycle and the spectrum from prevention to protection to identify the strongest and weakest areas in your own organisation.
2. 2Explain why harm goes unseen, including disguised compliance, the start again syndrome, normalisation and fixed optimism, and how professional curiosity counters them.
3. 3Use data, workforce information, voice, unannounced visits and outside links to judge whether a service may be developing a closed culture.
4. 4Distinguish reassurance from assurance and set out the information your board needs to know whether safeguarding is working.
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. 6Compare the common threads across the three cases and plan specific leadership actions on data, concerns, accountability and seeing the person.