What does professional curiosity mean?
Professional curiosity is the ability and willingness of a practitioner to ask questions, explore concerns, and seek deeper understanding rather than accepting things at face value. It means being open-minded, inquisitive, and proactive in gathering information to safeguard and support children and young people effectively.
It’s not about being intrusive or judgmental, it’s about thinking critically, noticing inconsistencies, and asking “What else might be happening here?” or “Is there more to this story?”
Professional curiosity means to look beyond what you see.
'Looking beyond what you see’ encourages practitioners to explore and understand what is happening in someone's life, rather than making assumptions or accepting what they are told at face value. It involves looking out for signs that things are not right and seeking out the evidence of what is really happening. It is a combination of looking, listening, asking direct questions, checking out and reflecting on ALL the information you receive.
Why is looking beyond what you see important?
Working in this way enables a practitioner to have a holistic view and understanding of what is happening within a family, to know what life is like for a child or young person, to fully assess potential risks.
Many people we work with are unable, or feel unable, to speak up for themselves. Many people are relying on us to identify the signs, to uncover what is really happening in their life, and to provide them with help to be safe.
Sometimes practitioners can feel they are being intrusive or that they may be overstepping their role if they ask that extra question, if they consider alternative explanations, if they start contacting others to check out their concerns. This is not the case. Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility, and seeking out all available information which helps keep children safe is what all practitioners should be doing as part of their everyday practice.
Children and young people may:
- Hide or minimize issues due to fear, shame, or loyalty to family
- Communicate indirectly through behaviour rather than words
- Live in complex situations where risks are not immediately obvious
Looking beyond what you can see enables practitioners to:
- Identify hidden risks (e.g, neglect, abuse, exploitation)
- Challenge assumptions and avoid confirmation bias
- Build trust by showing genuine interest and care
- Prevent harm early by spotting warning signs before they escalate
A lack of curiosity can lead to missed opportunities to identify less obvious indicators of vulnerability or significant harm. We know that in the worst circumstances this has resulted in death or serious abuse as confirmed by the learning from case reviews, both nationally and locally where practitioners have responded to presenting issues in isolation. It is often suggested by review authors, that practitioners in Leeds need to be more curious about a child’s life and experience.
How can you make ‘looking beyond what you see’ part of your everyday practice?
Don't be afraid to ask questions of families, and do so in an open way, so they know that you are asking to keep their children safe, not to judge or criticise.
Be open to the unexpected, and incorporate information that does not support your initial assumptions into your assessment of what life is like for the child in the family.
Seek clarity either from the family or other practitioners.
Be open to challenging, or having challenged, your own assumptions, views and interpretations as to what is happening; triangulate the information you hold.
Consider what you see as well as what you’re told. Are there any visual clues as to what life is like, or which don’t triangulate with the information you already hold?
Take a look around this section for suggestions on what questions to ask, how to record professional curiosity and how to get the most out of your supervision.
Being curious about protective factors
This resource focuses very much on developing your skills, to allow you to ask the right questions and consider experiences in a way which will help you to identify and manage risk to children, in order to keep them safe. Of course, as practitioners with a safeguarding responsibility, those skills are essential. But that’s only half the picture! Using your finely tuned skills of professional curiosity can also help you to identify family strengths and wider factors in a child’s life which serve to protect them from harm and adversity by meeting needs which, in the context of adversity, may be going unmet. A key aspect of the strengths based Leeds Practice Model , this sits at the heart of the aspiration to make Leeds a Trauma Informed City.
If you can work with families to explore the kinds of resources, relationships and experiences which have a protective effect, buffering children against the impact of adverse experiences, that can fundamentally strengthen, support and nurture a child’s capacity to cope with the adversity they’re navigating their way through.
So, along with all the questions you will see about how to identify and manage risk, if you are being holistically professionally curious, it’s vital to think about questions that enable you to identify protective factors too… They will help you to use your curiosity to underpin effective outcomes-based assessments, making the important connection between a family’s strengths and their opportunities.