I have a bit of a crush on Dr Carlene Firmin, the researcher who coined the term “contextual safeguarding” (it’s a professional crush, I hasten to add). Her work - first in her doctoral thesis, now in numerous papers and in social care settings across the country - around how children experience risk in reality has helped us to rewrite the role of child protection.

So, what does Firmin’s work tell us? Social care work around safeguarding previously tended to presume that when a child was struggling, either the child themselves or their family was the problem - and focus on strategies that might be used to “fix” them.

However, Firmin interviewed young people who had been affected by murder or rape, and yet were raised in safe home environments: the harms these children experienced came from well beyond their front door.

By taking a view that took local context and the whole experience of a child into account, Firmin recognised that the broader environment in which a child is growing up matters just as much as what is happening in the family home.

Getting safeguarding right

The development of contextual safeguarding facilitated an important shift in care policy. Whereas the old system assumed that assaults in a quiet stairwell or in poorly lit parks were somehow connected to deficits within the family, contextual safeguarding has pushed social care teams to think harder about the places where young people really spend their time. Where abuse is happening outside of the home, why should support plans focus on parenting courses? Adolescents function differently when with their peers, and the interactions and exposures to risk that take place in those environments can be very different from those that happen at home.

Schools also have to recognise these different contexts, understanding that a child’s peer group and social, educational and familial circumstances all feed into issues they might be experiencing.

Getting to know these contexts is not always easy. It involves creating opportunities to build trust, establish relationships and foster openness at school (challenging in our current context). It also means valuing student voice, parent voice and working within partnerships across the community.

To help young people to thrive, it’s time for all of our policies and practice to be modernised and adapted. We need to widen the lens when assessing young people. Where learning is poor, do we ask “what’s wrong with this child?” or do we ask “what’s going on around this child and how is that impacting their capacity to learn?”

We all (teachers, leaders and, indeed, Ofsted) should build capacity around our ability to assess the lived experience of the child rather than simply assessing the education experience they receive. And that means we need to stop trying to “fix” children and instead focus on understanding what they might be going through.

Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders

This article originally appeared in the 29 January 2021 issue under the headline “To improve safeguarding, we need to widen the lens”