London Partnership Reaches the Cusp of Systems Change with Safe & Together

An independent evaluation of the Safe & Together London Partnership has found the project moving much closer to lasting change in the systems that shape how children’s social care responds to domestic abuse. The partnership supports social work teams in six London boroughs to use the Safe & Together™ Model, which holds perpetrators accountable for the harm they cause while working alongside the non-abusive parent. Evaluators from London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit have followed the project since 2021. This report covers July 2023 to March 2025 and builds on a second year in which the work moved beyond training alone. Two of the original five boroughs stepped back after Year 2, and Barking and Dagenham and Barnet joined in Year 3, so the six current boroughs are at different stages of implementation. The progress came even though funding was secured one period at a time and the core team faced possible redundancy at the end of each one.

In this period, the partnership delivered 32 training sessions to 1,230 professionals, bringing the number trained since 2021 to more than 2,500. Implementation leads are specialist staff based in each borough. They carried out 774 one-to-one case consultations with social workers on live cases. Learning reviews of case files found less language that treats abuse as mutual or blames the victim-survivor. In one borough, cases were more likely to progress to child protection when the worker had received a consultation, and more likely to close after assessment when they had not. In Hammersmith and Fulham, social workers used the Model’s Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool to document abusive behaviour and its impact on the mother and children for the Family Court in three cases, and earlier contact decisions were overturned in all three. In one of those cases, the evidence contributed to a prosecution and conviction.

In the longer-standing boroughs, the partnership also changed the systems around practice. The Model is now built into quality assurance and complaints processes, including a new form for recording complaints from perpetrators. Hackney and Barnet have added a dedicated form to their case management systems for recording what social workers require of perpetrators. Before this, that work could only be noted in free text. The evaluators also point to the emotional burden that working with perpetrators places on a largely female and minoritised workforce, and to tension in some parts of the system over the word “perpetrator.” They will examine both in the next phase of the evaluation, which may be the last. The report notes that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales has cited the partnership as an example of good practice worth investing in.