Edinburgh’s Case File Audit: What Changed After Safe & Together Training

When Edinburgh’s Child Protection Committee compared domestic abuse case files from before and after rolling out the Safe & Together™ Model, files handled by trained “Safe & Together Champions” showed sharply better practice than the pre-training baseline.

The audit began with a problem. A 2014 review of 26 case files involving repeated police call-outs found workers focused on single violent incidents rather than a broader pattern of control, assumed separation would automatically create safety, and placed the burden of protecting children on non-abusing parents while perpetrators went largely unaddressed. Those findings drove the city to fund Safe & Together training starting in 2015.

A second audit compared 18 cases held by untrained workers against 12 cases held by trained Champions. Assessments that fully met best practice in identifying domestic abuse risk rose from 12% of files before training to 50% of Champion-held files afterward. Child’s plans fully capturing the wide-ranging impact of abuse on children rose from 6% to 58%. Workers who hadn’t been trained still showed some improvement too, which the report attributes to team leaders passing on what they’d learned.

Edinburgh’s own writeup is candid that this covered case file quality only—not family interviews, long-term outcomes, or cost impact. The city’s action plan calls for exactly those pieces next.