‘But what do we do next?’ It had become something of a CS ‘sixty-fourthousand-dollar question’. I was a practice development manager with the recently formed CS team in Hackney, and I’d been invited into a meeting to think through the implications of a social work assessment. As we talked, it became clear that for the young person we were there to consider, his experiences of harm outside the home were much more ‘significant’ than anything going on at home. This was a young person who had been excluded from school, and felt too scared to travel to the Pupil Referral Unit where he was now meant to go. In fact, for the past week, he had been too scared to leave his home because his friend had been violently attacked just outside his home and this young person thought the same would likely happen to him. The practitioner presenting the case had drawn on new prompts in the Child and Family Assessment (developed through the new CS approach) to think more broadly about the young person's life outside the home. Using this information, she drew on a flip chart paper a rough context weighting tool (a way to consider which context has the most pressing issues), which made the situation even clearer – the problem was not at home. Not only that, we realised that just working with him on his own would do nothing to change his neighbourhood, peer group and school environment – the contexts where he was experiencing harm. But what kind of social work could be done to change these contexts so that he, and his friends, could be safer? What role did youth workers have in this and was it even possible to address things like sexism, poverty, racism – the underlying structural reasons behind the issues we were discussing? These felt like huge, and at times quite overwhelming, questions. Alongside this, there were internal pressures coming from within the organisation, with senior managers wanting assurances that doing something different, and not focusing on family dynamics and parental capacity, was going to be ‘worth’ the extra time and cost. So what were we to do next?

That was three years ago. Up to that point, CS researchers had partnered with practitioners to create processes which, by and large, mirrored traditional safeguarding practice with families to respond to EFH.