(Pictured Above) Nicole Savage, Senior Officer in North Lanarkshire Council and Lead in Contextual Safeguarding Implementation
“I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain. The intense, often unmitigated pain…”
Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
When people ask me what I do for my job, I often pause and think: how can I explain the multiple layers, the organisational and strategic cross-cutting work, the people I meet, and the vision to change systems for the better?
I usually opt for a shorter answer. This blog is an attempt to put some of that complexity into perspective, and to explain why it can be so difficult to describe what we do, or what anyone does, when working within contextual safeguarding approaches.
My first degree was in criminology, and I found the public and media responses to different crimes to be fascinating. As a social worker in both justice social work and within children and families practice, I was often struck by how little context was used to understand people’s lives and the ‘choices’ they were making. I saw too many young people being punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, making decisions based on survival or under pressure. I saw generations of families caught in the same patterns, with trauma being repeated in the hope of a different outcome.
I also saw something else: systems that struggled to hold the workers trying to make change. Many burned out, losing the passion that brought them into frontline practice in the first place.
It was around this time that I encountered contextual safeguarding. It changed how I saw my work. Once you understand it, it’s difficult to walk away from.
What is contextual safeguarding?
Contextual safeguarding recognises that children and young people can experience harm outside the family home – in schools, parks, peer groups, communities and online spaces. Rather than focusing solely on parenting capacity, it considers the wider contexts in which harm occurs, and seeks to reduce risk by changing those environments.
This approach is closely aligned with prevention and early intervention. By identifying emerging risks in contexts such as peer groups, schools or communities – such as exploitation, peer-on-peer abuse or harmful online behaviour – services can intervene earlier, before harm escalates.
It shifts the focus from reactive responses to proactive, preventative action, strengthening safety in the spaces young people regularly occupy.
Within the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU), contextual safeguarding principles underpin a range of prevention and early intervention approaches. One example is the Safe Space Scheme, which works with local partners and community settings to create environments where young people can seek safety, support, and trusted adult contact when they feel at risk.
The difference it can make
Practitioners often describe contextual safeguarding as a shift in how they understand their work.
It changes what you see. You stop locating ‘the problem’ solely within a child’s behaviour or parenting. Instead, you begin to see places, peer groups, adult behaviours, power, poverty, racism, vulnerability, grooming and policy response as part of the safeguarding picture.
It also changes how you work. Practice becomes more relational, more curious, and often more creative. Many practitioners describe feeling closer to why they entered social work or youth work in the first place.
Common reflections on the benefits of contextual safeguarding include that it provides a new lens for understanding harm, leads to more meaningful relationships with young people, encourages greater honesty about risk, and gives those who use it a renewed sense of purpose and values-led practice.
The reality: system tension
Alongside these opportunities, practitioners often describe significant tensions too.
There can be a constant pull between child welfare values and crime control responses, alongside ethical discomfort when working closely with policing or enforcement-based systems.
Many describe feeling that systems tend to default to process over relationships, individual blame over contextual understanding, and speed over reflection.
Practitioners can often feel pulled in opposing directions, holding responsibility for complex risks while working within systems that are not always designed to support contextual approaches.
At times, this can lead to feelings of isolation, pressure, and emotional strain, alongside pride in the work itself. But this is not a reflection of individual weakness, it is a predictable response to contradictory demands. It can feel like being asked to think ecologically, work creatively, and hold risk relationally – all while operating within fixed thresholds, tight timescales, and established accountability structures.
At times, it can feel like being asked to transform the garden without opening the gate.
To manage this tension, practitioners often end up carrying risk individually, working harder rather than being better supported, or becoming the ‘bridge’ between young people and systems, often at personal cost.
This work cannot be sustained through individual resilience alone.
What supports sustainable practice?
Sustaining contextual safeguarding requires more than commitment at practitioner level. It requires systems that actively support the work.
A few things that can help include:
- Strong peer networks across and within agencies
- Reflective supervision that holds emotion as well as activity
- Shared ownership of risk and decision-making
- Leadership that protects and advocates for contextual approaches
- Permission to slow down, reflect and think relationally.
Supervision in particular plays a key role. It needs to go beyond asking ‘What did you do?’ and instead allow for ethical uncertainty, emotional impact, and structural barriers.
What does not help is treating contextual safeguarding as an ‘add-on’, relying on a small number of committed individuals to carry out the work, or expecting innovation without resourcing or protection.
If contextual safeguarding only survives because of overwork or personal sacrifice, it is not embedded.
Honest reflections on implementation
Implementing contextual safeguarding brings important learning, but also real challenges. It requires a cultural shift away from traditional models of child protection, and can challenge established roles, responsibilities and thresholds.
Measuring impact can also be difficult, particularly when change is focused on environments rather than individuals, and when progress takes time.
There can be tensions around accountability, information sharing, and differing thresholds for intervention, especially where the victim is also causing harm to others.
However, where agencies commit to shared responsibility and maintaining a child-centred focus, outcomes can improve.
To sustain this work, practitioners need time and space to build relationships, a recognition of the emotional labour involved, reflective spaces outside of line management, and clarity and consistency across agencies.
They also need permission to work relationally and thoughtfully. Ultimately, they are more likely to stay to do the work when their values are recognised, their emotional load is acknowledged, and their practice is understood rather than romanticised.
Conclusion
Contextual safeguarding recognises that harm does not only occur within families, that context matters, and that early intervention in community and peer settings can prevent escalation. For it to work, partnership working is essential, not optional, and its practitioners must be properly supported.
It is also not an easy option. It is counter-cultural work. If you feel tired but committed, proud but uneasy, inspired but frustrated, you are not failing.
In fact, you are describing the reality of ethical practice within constrained systems. This work is worth doing – but it must not be carried alone.
Professionals and leaders should continue to strengthen contextual approaches through training, partnership working and reflective practice, while also ensuring that systems adapt (or even radically disrupt) to better reflect the realities of young people’s lives.
The work that the SVRU is doing with the Safe Space Scheme reflects what contextual safeguarding asks of us: to move beyond individual responses to harm, and instead actively shape the spaces, relationships and systems around young people so that safety becomes something built into everyday environments.
Just as importantly, we need to take care of one another, and be willing to name the challenges out loud.
By Nicole Savage, Senior Officer in North Lanarkshire Council and Lead in Contextual Safeguarding Implementation