Signs of Safety Research

You Can’t Grow Roses in Concrete

Signs of Safety English Innovations Project report

15 Dec 2016

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• English

In mid-2014, Munro, Turnell and Murphy Child Protection Consulting (MTM) succeeded in securing English government innovations funding to work intensively with ten local authorities over eighteen months. The project became known as the Signs of Safety English Innovations Project (referred to in this document as Innovations Project or EIP or the project). Funding was provided to implement Signs of Safety practice in each local authority and to work with each authority in re-designing organisational procedures and functioning to better support this approach in helping children, young people and families. The ten local authorities involved were Brent, Bristol, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Tower Hamlets, Wakefield, West Sussex, and Wokingham. This selection provided a rich mixture of urban and rural areas.

Reporting on transformational and necessarily extensive reforms in ten local authorities is potentially a vast task and the action research was a modest strand of the work. Therefore the following report provides a broad brush picture of what has happened, picking out key themes and illustrating the diversity of the implementations. It is structured as a list of key elements of the reforms, but attention is given to reporting on how successfully these elements must interact to produce the desired changes.