Every day, practitioners work together to safeguard children and young people. Assessment of risk to children is a uniquely challenging task and the onus is on social workers and other safeguarding professionals to ‘get this right’ for children and young people (O’Neill, 2007). Yet risk assessment is beset by the navigating tensions between knowing how best to act based on agreed ‘facts’ and ‘not knowing’, curiosity and uncertainty (Mason, 1993). Identifying risk of EFH adds an additional layer of complexity for practitioners who must manage many unknowns regarding the social conditions of abuse. To navigate such tensions, multi-agency meetings have been developed to support practitioners to explore different perspectives on risk, and plan context-specific safeguarding responses for young people at risk or experiencing EFH. In recent times, there has been a proliferation of such meetings with the aim of creating safety for young people. However, in what ways do these meetings support partners – including young people and families – to embed a CS approach to EFH?

What we do we know about multi-agency safeguarding meetings?

Partnership working is enshrined within child welfare legislation and positioned as central to protecting children and young people (Department for Education, 2018). A series of high-profile reports into child deaths and analysis of Serious Case Reviews have repeatedly identified problems with multi-agency working, particularly difficulties with information sharing across organisational boundaries (Ward et al, 2012). To address these difficulties, multi-agency meetings represent an opportunity to build relationships between agencies, share information and, critically, make sense of information that often can be quite patchy in making decisions about how best to intervene to protect children (Salmon and Rapport, 2005). For multi-agency working to be effective, a series of inter-related factors is required, including existing good relationships, a shared value base and clear aims and objectives, as well as access to a range of interventions (Cameron et al, 2012).

Addressing EFH via a CS approach is dependent on developing new relationships with non-traditional safeguarding partners with knowledge and reach into contexts beyond the home where young people might be at risk (Firmin, 2020). It also creates opportunities for the professional network to draw on multiple perspectives about what might be happening for young people with a view to developing new and creative solutions to address harm across a range of contexts.