Turnell: Signs of Safety: Aligning the organisation to the practice

Around the world child protection systems keep taking more and more children into care, fighting with more families rather than working with them, and making the work more bureaucratic.

Professor Andrew Turnell contends that the crisis of child protection is fundamentally a crisis of vision. By this Andrew means that because child protection systems don’t have a clear vision about how to do the complex work of child protection together with families and keep children safe alongside a detailed vision of the organisation arrangements to support collaborative practice, systems tend to default to defensive practice in their decision-making, practice, policy and organisation.

Over 30 years Professor Turnell has work with child protection systems from Cambodia to Canada, USA to Uzbekistan, Australia to Ireland (sorry ran out of alliteration). Over this time Andrew has been involved in the continued evolution of the Signs of Safety practice approach to child protection. In this presentation Andrew will talk about lessons he has learnt in the practice development work and most especially the implementation lessons he has learnt about what it takes to align organisational systems to safety organised participatory practice.