Safe & Together Moves Beyond Training in London’s Second Year

A year after five East London boroughs began embedding the Safe & Together™ Model in their children’s social care teams, a sixth borough, Hammersmith and Fulham, joined the partnership, and the project’s use of the Safe & Together Model moved beyond training alone. Independent evaluators from London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, who tracked the project’s first year, returned for a second year to see whether that first year’s early gains were holding.

By Year 2, training was just one part of a four-part approach that also included one-to-one case consultations from implementation leads, a shared “professional hub” of tools and resources, and ongoing case audits and quality-assurance review. Case audits across all six boroughs found the “green shoots” identified in Year 1 taking root into more consistent patterns of practice, and Hackney completed a new case-management system for recording interventions with perpetrators, the first concrete way any borough could track this work directly, which the rest of the partnership is now expected to adopt.

In the two boroughs where the approach has been used longest, evaluators noted a rise in complaints from perpetrators, a pattern they read as a possible sign that workers are challenging them more directly rather than a cause for concern, though boroughs are being encouraged to plan for it. That progress came against a backdrop of short-term, insecure funding that strained staff retention and contributed to two of the original five boroughs stepping back from the partnership by the end of Year 2, even as interest in extending the approach city-wide remained strong.