12 - Counting children and chip shops: dilemmas and challenges in evaluating the impact of Contextual Safeguarding

Summary

Introduction

As has been explained in Chapter 11, whereas conventional safeguarding responses are centred on individual young people experiencing extrafamilial risks, and their families, CS approaches seek to harness the potential of social care practice and systems to target additionally the social conditions and associated contexts where EFH occurs. Lloyd and Owens in Chapter 11 have outlined the extended set of outcomes that this innovative approach aims to achieve. We move now in this chapter to consider how organisations and safeguarding networks might measure the different kinds of impact produced by systems designed on CS principles. In particular, we explore how research and evaluation needs to not only ascertain the service experiences and outcomes for individual children considered to be at risk (what CS terms Level 1 professional responses – see Introduction), but whether risky extra-familial contexts themselves become any safer as a result of Level 2 responses.

One example of this would be where two young people were approached and groomed for exploitation when hanging around outside their local chip shop. Measures would be needed not only of whether the safety of these two young people individually had been enhanced through professional intervention but of whether the chip shop and its surroundings had become a safer environment as a result of the CS approach. The impact of the latter is potentially much further reaching, as safety might be created around multiple young people socialising in that setting, and over an extended time period. Effective evaluation, as a result, must cover the impact of both levels of CS response.

To explore the implications of this, we draw on three separate studies that we (the three chapter authors) have previously conducted, which took rather different approaches. We discuss the reasons for taking the particular approach on each occasion, some of the complexities encountered and what insights the work offers for what is both possible and meaningful to measure when researching the impact of CS systems.

Starting from scratch: evaluating a whole-system chang

CS began as a theory – a hypothesis based on the research of Firmin et al (2016) that had revealed how professional responses to harms such as exploitation during adolescence needed to recognise and address the peer and environmental risks and relationships that lay beyond the family and home.