Safeguarding Week is being held across West Yorkshire by Safeguarding Adults Boards, Safeguarding Children Partnerships and Community Safety Partnerships. It provides a great opportunity to promote awareness and understanding of safeguarding issues and services.
Throughout the week each district is offering sessions that are open to practitioners across the region.
A list of regional events is included below. For more information about each event, click the course title. This will take you to the Eventbrite booking site.
In Leeds we would also like everyone to all reflect on professional curiosity. It is a theme from Safeguarding Adults Reviews, Safeguarding Children Practice Reviews and Domestic Homicide Reviews in Leeds. The three partnerships have come together to create a common set of definitions and resources. Please use these within your services to reflect on your practice and how your organisation supports and promotes professional curiosity. These resources are available further down the page.
Please also consider what you and your organisation can do to support Safeguarding Week this year.
Are there other things you could do to promote safeguarding within your services? Is there an event you can put for your staff? Is there information you can share with volunteers? Is there a session you could provide for people who use your services? However big or small - everything you do makes a difference. Our
posters, leaflets and videos can help you to promote awareness
West Yorkshire Regional Events
Monday 19 June 2023 - Hosted by Leeds
Please join early to allow the session to start at the designated time
Tuesday 20 June 2023 - Hosted by Kirklees
Venue: Brian Jackson House Huddersfield HD1 Tuesday 20 June
Venue: Brian Jackson House Huddersfield HD1 Tuesday 20 June
Wednesday 21 June 2023 - Hosted by Wakefield
Thursday 22 June 2023 - Hosted by Calderdale
Friday 23 June 2023 - Hosted by Bradford
Leeds Practice Resources for Safeguarding Week 2023
Professional curiosity: Look Further, Think Wider, See More
Professional curiosity is a learning point from Safeguarding Adults Reviews, Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews, and Domestic Homicide Reviews in Leeds. These resources have been developed to support safeguarding practice and learning and development activities (they can be included in training content, policy, guidance and reports).
What is Professional Curiosity?
Professional curiosity is where a practitioner seeks to explore and understand what is happening in someone's life, rather than making assumptions or accepting what they are told at face value. It is a learning point from Safeguarding Adults Reviews, Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews, and Domestic Homicide Reviews in Leeds. It involves:
- Building a trusting relationship and a safe environment in which the person feels comfortable to share information about themselves.
- Looking for the person behind the behaviour. Being interested about their history, identity and individual needs, what's the bigger picture?
- Asking yourself what is really happening? Thinking wider than what can be seen and is known, recognising that something else may be causing this situation.
- Asking questions about what you see and hear, being curious in a sensitive way to get the essential details of the person's life.
- Looking out for signs that things are not right and seeking out the evidence of what is really happening.
- Having the confidence to be proactive, reflect, ask difficult questions and check out your concerns.
- Having the courage to seek clarity and support from within your organisation and from other organisations and services.
Why is it important?
- Many people are unable, or feel unable, to speak up for themselves and may rely on others to identify the signs, uncover what is really happening in their life and help them to be safe.
- Being curious helps to get a better understanding of the person and their circumstances and in turn helps to make plans more effective to keep people safe.
- Professional curiosity is a recurring theme within safeguarding reviews, highlighting the need to fully understand a person's situation. We can learn from experience.
- Being curious may reveal situations where a person is demonstrating disguised compliance; where they seem to be co-operating with professionals in order to allay concerns and stop professional engagement (adapted from Reder et al, 1993)
Professional Curiosity Guides have been produced as a result of learning both locally and nationally that Professional Curiosity is a vital element of everyone's role to safeguard people at risk.
A PowerPoint presentation has been developed primarily to support training in relation to professional curiosity and includes reference and links to reviews whereby professional curiosity was a key theme. This PowerPoint could also be used in other settings, for example to support practice discussion and reflection in team meetings, and can be adapted to meet differing needs. Please email the LSAB Strategy Unit for a copy; LSAB@leeds.gov.uk
