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Welcome to the first Tackling Child Exploitation Support Programme Newsletter
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Partnership Update
Anna Racher, Partnership Manager
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Latest news from the TCE programme
With the programme fully established and delivering at capacity we have, more and more, been looking at how we build and strengthen the influence we have within child exploitation and extra familial harm systems. As we closed out the year we had a full delivery programme, a refreshed stream of quality assured resources added to the microsite, the publication of our first peer reviewed article as a programme and live Twitter conversations on Children and Young People’s Voice and Equalities Inclusion and Diversity. In addition we have continued to engage with a cross-section of Government Departments leading cross-government dialogue groups on child exploitation.
But our activities haven’t just been focused on consolidating what we have done so far, we have also been working across the team to define and deepen what we can achieve in the second eighteen months of the programme. We have been working with the systems change experts within The Children’s Society to further articulate our own ambitions for system change: to define our role as a catalyst for constructive disruption; what this really means, what skills this requires and what we will see when we are getting it right – which Craig reflects on below. We have also had a look at the microsite again to make some changes to make it easier to find and search for resources (due to go live in February). And we are planning how we can use an Action Learning approach to generate regional and thematic learning directly with local partnerships.
In the coming weeks we will be sharing more on the progress of our Year 2 priorities, as well as inviting wider reflections to inform our second Annual Learning Report. But we are also conscious that, not for the first time this past year, we, local partnerships and all of you who work with us are facing an utterly transformed strategic landscape.
So, as Ellie describes below, we are also starting the year gently and reflectively, being mindful of balancing our ambition for change with the needs of us all in the here and now. From all the team, look after yourselves, stay safe and our absolute best wishes for your work and wider lives; it’s tough out there…
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TCE created a safe space where our partnership can begin to understand the question to focus our goal. - quote from a local area.
Bespoke Support Projects
The TCE delivery team are currently have 19 live Bespoke Support Projects.
Of these, six BSPs are from our most recent application window (which closed in September last year), where we explicitly requested that local areas focus their applications on one of TCE’s Year Two priorities (voice of the child and young person; equality, diversity and inclusion; horizontal and vertical expansion and integration).
Interestingly, the majority of applications submitted were from local areas wanting to explore horizontal and vertical expansion. So, as well as working with six partnerships individually on this theme, we are also working with them collectively to draw out shared learning. I will be leading this thematic approach to delivery, wearing my Delivery Partner hat! We hope to extract key learning in relation to whether integration and/or expansion ‘improves’ the strategic response to child exploitation and extra-familial harm. If this is something you are interested in, please contact me directly.
Overall, delivery is going well. Obviously the world has changed on us again since December and we continue to adapt our approach to respond to the very real pressures and safeguarding challenges local partnerships are facing during lockdown. So far all projects remain fully committed to progressing, but understandably with variable levels of availability and immediate engagement from senior colleagues in local partnerships. From cross-consortium conversations, we know we are not the only programme trying to find creative solutions to keeping partners engaged. With this continued level of engagement in mind, we are delighted to be progressing with our next round of delivery, but with an adapted approach to application.
For this round we have decided to move away from a formal application process to a shorter and more collaborative Expression of Interest (EOI) process that will allow for meaningful conversations with partnerships at an earlier point in the process.
Expressions of Interest can be submitted by all types of partnerships across England, not limited to geographical boundaries. The programme is interested in working with networks of organisations who are working collectively to respond to child exploitation and extra-familial harm such as; groups of commissioners, health representatives or non-typical partnership arrangements that may work together on a national level. If this sounds like an opportunity you would be interested in, please express your interest for Bespoke Support (Deadline – Friday 12 March)..
Project Learning Reports
Bedfordshire is our most recent project to have completed in November 2020. You can read this and the other Learning Reports here.
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New resources are regularly added to the Microsite
Between October and December we added a further 28 resources to the microsite and during the same period we had 2,562 unique sessions on the site, which represents a 281% growth from our launch baseline. Outside of the home page and resources we specifically promote, the most visited pages are BSP Project Learning Reports.
December saw a series of reflections published on the microsite on the priority areas, identified by the TCE team and the sector as important to consider in more detail in relation to tackling child exploitation.
One of these is the multi-dimensional challenges that equality, diversity and inclusion raise in relation to child exploitation. Jahnine Davis and Nick Marsh, from Listen Up Research wrote a think-piece on what local areas should be thinking about in relation to these issues. Anna Racher, TCE Partnership Manager blogged on the work that the TCE Programme are planning in this space.
Ensuring that young People’s voices are heard as part of the strategic response to child exploitation in local areas is another one of our programme priorities. Our aim is to identify and share ways in which senior leaders can bring children and young people’s voice into strategic discussions about child exploitation and extra familial harm.
Ellie Fairgrieve, Head of Delivery and Isabelle Brodie, University of Bedfordshire, introduce the work they are doing on this here.
Featured resources
Given its complexity and evolving nature, the way that local areas approach and organise child exploitation services is not straightforward. This briefing for Research in Practice addresses some of the key issues and looks at how holistic, complex and contextual safeguarding systems can help address and prevent child exploitation.
In this video, Dr Kristine Hickle introduces the concept of a trauma-informed approach to responding to child exploitation, which is increasingly being recognised as an important way to acknowledge and respond to previous traumatic experiences.
You can find all our resources on the TCE Microsite.
If there is a resource you would like us to consider for publication you can tell us about it here.
If you would like to talk to us about any of the resources on the site, please let us know.
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Emerging Issues - TCE Programme Team
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If you haven't been following the programme on Twitter you can catch up with our latest blogs and conversations here.
Most recently we've been thinking about...
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Joining the Dots - TCE Programme Team
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Across the programme we use Joining the Dots as a framework to help us shape change.
Each month a member of the programme team shares reflections here on their own approach and learning when supporting and challenging leaders within local partnerships to lead with care, build bridges and to hold space for complexity, uncertainty and curiosity.
Craig Grady, Implementation Lead
Catalyst for Constructive Disruption
As a programme, our ambition is to change the system instead of shifting it temporarily, so we have been thinking a lot as a team about how we can enable the conditions for positive change – or constructive disruption.
As a TCE Implementation Lead, my role is to support local partnerships to identify opportunities – which might be being missed or overlooked – to change the system in a sustainable and long lasting way. So within the team we are coming to think of ourselves as ‘catalysts’. The disruption we talk about is purposefully trying to influence the structures which can hold partnerships back from making sustainable change.
The strategic challenges safeguarding partnerships face are complex; as are child exploitation and extra familial harm themselves. So what we often see are dynamics such as culture, process, policy, attitudes and behaviours replicating and reinforcing this complexity within child exploitation teams, services and partnerships. So, for me, being a ‘constructive disruptor’ is about working to influence the dynamics that hold these complex structures in place. This requires me to surface and address the – often hidden – beliefs, patterns and motivations which govern the how and why of strategic decision making. This means that in order to do systems change, or enact constructive disruption, I’ve had to think differently about the skills needed to catalyse a partnership to think differently about how they strategically respond to exploitation.
The skills we are coming to value are not ones that add to or replicate this complexity, but rather ones which pare it back, which are capable of handling systems with care to disrupt gently but explicitly. So, in thinking about system change, we haven’t been thinking about grand theories so much as softer skills; like empathy, patience, strong relational and communication skills, perspective and objectivity.
As opposed to approaching partnership working as some kind of ‘expert’ I believe we need the skills to collaborate with partnerships as curious professionals. We are intentionally looking to change the way we work and interact within partnerships. To cut through (mis)perception, entrenched beliefs and siloed contexts the tools we need are active listening, building relationships and being accountable to create trust and empathy; and the ability to hold and communicate multiple stakeholder positions. Providing a shared forum to promoting insights from different partnership contexts and amplifying and translating learning across partners is a simple put powerful tool, allowing individual knowledge to become group knowledge.
There is always a lot of activity and innovation going on across the sector to improve outcomes for young people; but often these opportunities often exist in isolation: a constellation of dots which can make it hard to identify what will unlock the systemic challenges facing a local area. These softer skills allow me to support partnerships to see the ‘joining lines’ between the dots, so they can start to see the shared needs and priorities. So much of what I do is to hold the space within projects for partners to collaborate and agree these guiding stars together. Investing in this time and providing this opportunity for partners is constructive disruption: old ways working being recycled to pave the way for impactful, sustainable, change
For me, we’ll be getting this right when we start to see collaborative working becoming the norm; and we see clearly articulated and explicitly shared values and goals cutting through the complexity and ‘joining the dots’ for local area partnerships. A key sign that would make me think we are going in the right direction is when we start to hear people and relationships as being the focus of ‘systemic change’ as much as policy and process.
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