Mr. Cormac Quinlan:

I will be pleased to clarify the signs of safety approach. Signs of safety is a way of working with families and a rigorous assessment process and very effective way of engaging with parents and children right through the process of assessment and intervention in addressing critical concerns about harm to children. In terms of training, we will start signs of safety in what we call our front door service or our duty intake service and it will extend right through to what we call child protection conferencing. We will train 2,800 staff across the organisation. All of our front-line staff will engage in a two-day training course, with many having already completed it. All our practice leaders, which includes our team leaders, principal social workers and area managers have been included in a five-day training programme, which also has an additional two-day introductory piece.

We have committed to implementing the signs of safety approach in the next couple of years. Its implementation will not be achieved by training alone. One of the key goals of the child protection and welfare strategy is to develop a learning organisation, which is what we are trying to achieve. Over the next two years, we plan to develop a learning trajectory for all our practice leaders. We will bring them back and reflect on how they are using the approach, how effective it is for them and what are the challenges we face in implementing it. We will also address the issues and questions they have and support them throughout that journey in the next three years.

We have engaged a number of strong experts in the field to achieve this, including for the next two years Dr. Andrew Turnell, the co-creator of signs of safety. Dr. Turnell is delivering the majority of our training across the country. We have also engaged two other consultants, including Professor Eileen Munro, with whom members may be familiar. Professor Munro did a comprehensive review of the child protection system in the United Kingdom and will partner with us. We will evaluate the use of the approach over the duration of its implementation. The consultants will carry out an evaluation and we will seek to commission an independent evaluation of how successful the child protection and welfare strategy has been. One cannot evaluate something until it has been implemented, however, and the evaluation will be done at a later stage.