The LSCP priorities of 2024/25 - identified from learning from reviews, inspection findings, audit and national learning - have continued through 2025/26 with an expansion of Safeguarding through Family Help to encompass the Families First Partnership reforms. These are:
- Domestic Abuse – recognising children as victims
- Safeguarding through Family Help
- Safeguarding Adolescents - Serious Youth Violence and Exploitation
Priority One: Domestic Abuse- Children as victims
In May 2025, the LSCP held a joint Domestic Abuse and Children OBA event with Safer Leeds for practitioners with the focus on the response in Leeds to children as victims of domestic abuse.
There were over 50 practitioners in attendance representing a cross section of the wider partnership, including West Yorkshire Police, Children and Families Services, health providers, Yorkshire Ambulance service, Probation, adult social care, Fire and Rescue, Youth Justice Service, third sector, legal, education and housing. The event was attended by Councillors Harland and Hayden who provided the opening and closing remarks.
The half day event included an outline of the Leeds Domestic Violence and Abuse Strategy 2023 to 2028, which contains a specific chapter on Children and Young People and the ambitions to ensure children have adequate support for as long as they need it and to listen to the voices of children and young people to develop appropriate support and services. The current offer in Leeds was outlined, which includes:
- The Elevate project – a service from Leeds Women’s Aid that supports children and young people who have been impacted by domestic violence and abuse.
- Clusters aim to identify those families, children, and young people most in need and to ensure they are offered the right intervention at the right time, by the right people as early as possible in the life of the problem.
- Children’s Centres will offer similar support to families but will work with families with children under 5 and pregnant mothers.
- Schools and colleges offer pastoral care, providing physical and emotional welfare to children and young people.
- Operation Encompass - a police and education early information safeguarding partnership enabling schools to offer immediate support to children experiencing domestic abuse.
- Family Group Conferencing - a voluntary meeting which takes place to help find solutions to family problems.
- Early Help Hubs providing support to families across the city have a Domestic Abuse Co-ordinator to support the multi-disciplinary team in providing a joined-up response.
There was recognition of opportunities to develop a city-wide modular training offer on domestic abuse for the Children and Families services workforce whilst recognising there remain gaps around perpetrator interventions and funding.
Following the event, Safer Leeds and the LSCP collated the feedback, views and experiences of front-line practitioners to senior leaders in the form of an action plan.
Three Boards event – LSCP, Leeds Safeguarding Adults Board and Safer Leeds
In September 2025, a Three Board event was held represented by members of each of the LSCP, the Leeds Safeguarding Adults Board and Safer Leeds.
Emerging from those discussions was a clear consensus that there were opportunities to review how the three boards worked together to turn ‘shared issues’ into ‘shared actions’ and ‘shared commitments’ aimed at improving the safety of everyone who lives in Leeds.
The three-board planning day provided a valuable opportunity to reflect, reconnect, and reframe collective ambitions. With a renewed focus on strategic alignment, shared priorities, and trauma-informed practice, the session reaffirmed the boards commitment to collaborative working and continuous improvement across safeguarding and community safety.
Key themes and strategic insights identified opportunities to strengthen collective impact, stronger governance and integration, evolving practice and culture and improved communication and connectivity.
There were several proposals and ambitions discussed on the day which included one shared ambition to commence during 2026/27 alongside a shared framework for its governance and oversight. The consensus was that the shared ambition should be focused upon domestic abuse as an existing priority for each board/partnership and would be a provide a natural place to explore new ways of working.
To support the above ambitions and new ways of working, the three board/partnership managers meet regularly to provide updates, support development and strengthen communication and connectivity, identifying opportunities to work collaboratively.
Priority Two: Safeguarding through Family Help
Safeguarding through Family Help - an established priority for the partnership in 2024/25 - was broadened to include the national reforms during 2025/26. During 2025/26 Leeds continued its activity of work as part of the national Families First Partnership Programme, preparing for the introduction of Family Help, Multi-Agency Child Protection Teams (MACPTs) and strengthened Family Network support arrangements.
There are many elements of activity in the Family Help guidance, that are already delivered in Leeds either as part of the Family Hubs, the Early Help review, the Leeds Practice Model and the Family Group Conferencing (FGC) service. There is reassurance that Leeds is in a strong position to reflect on the guidance with a view to understanding what is currently delivered that would be considered “Family Help” and to focus attention on developing the additional elements it contains.
Test and Learn in East Leeds
During 2025/26, Leeds undertook a series of Family Help test-and-learn activities in the Compton/East Leeds area of the city to explore how social work, Family Hub and partner services could work together more effectively to support children and families. The pilot tested new approaches to multidisciplinary working, joint decision-making and earlier coordinated support, helping to identify opportunities and challenges associated with co-location, referral pathways, workforce capacity, information systems and links to wider reform activity.
The pilot identified strengths in co-location as being productive and time saving, allowing for joint conversations, multiple perspectives and otherwise unknown information regarding children and their families being shared in a timely manner. Practitioners identified positive opportunities to get to know one another and enhance understanding of different roles and responsibilities from across agencies which strengthened joint working as referrals came in and changed the trajectory for some families.
Practitioners’ feedback as part of the pilot highlighted:
“Having access to a multi-disciplinary team to provide the right package of support and information to families is inevitably the best system we can have”
“Working together using the same paperwork will make escalation and de-escalation much easier”
“The family really benefitted from the expertise of the domestic abuse coordinator. The knowledge and experience she had really complimented to the support we were able to provide in a timely manner”
The challenges were also noted in respect of communication and misinformation, the variances between reporting for Early Help and Children’s Social care, systems alignment and sustaining ongoing attendance at duty weeks. Learning from the pilot continues to inform the ongoing development of Leeds Family Help model and provided valuable insight into the practical changes required to support implementation of the Families First reforms across the city.
A number of partnership engagement events are being coordinated for early 2026/27 and beyond to galvanise partners around the reforms and to continue to seek their views in developing and co-producing a multi-agency Family Help model. The reforms will be developed alongside the Best Start and Young Futures to ensure a coordinated approach, alongside consultation and co-production with families. This will be underpinned by continued evaluation and review ahead of full implementation in 2027.
The Multi-Agency Neglect Project
Following the inspection (this link goes to a pdf of the report on the Ofsted website) of Leeds City Council’s Children and Families services under the full Local Authority Children's Services (ILAC) framework in July 2025, an area for improvement was in respect of ensuring consistency in response to all children experiencing neglect.
The inspection highlighted that neglect is identified and responded to effectively for many children in Leeds; the Multisystemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect (MST-CAN) team deliver intensive support for highly vulnerable children and their families through purposeful interventions. However, beyond the MST-CAN team, the response to neglect was not as robust. Opportunities to strengthen included improved use of assessment tools and planning for a small number of children to ensure clear change, where a small number of children continued to be exposed to neglect.
In response, in December 2025 the Children and Young People Partnership (CYPP) meeting representatives took part in multi-agency round table discussions on the subject of neglect and considered questions around what works well in Leeds in response to neglect, replicable responses to this and what are the key obstacles and challenges. This same session saw agreement from the partnership to launch the Multi-Agency Neglect Project, which also serves as a key element of the LSCP priority in respect of Safeguarding through Family Help.
The LSCP has agreed the focus on neglect as a priority area from 2025 to 2027, and likely beyond, to understand how to address practice and any systemic issues which lie behind difficulties for practitioners in identifying and responding to neglect and create recommendations and action for the partnership to take forward.
Priority Three: Safeguarding Adolescents - Serious Youth Violence and Exploitation
Following on from the work the LSCP has undertaken since the Joint Targeted Area Inspection (JTAI) of the multi-agency response to serious youth violence in Leeds in 2024, this has continued across the partnership to improve practice and the identification and reduction of risks for teenagers, particularly those at risk due to serious youth violence and exploitation.
Audit on Serious Youth Violence
The JTAI of 2024 outlined the need for the partnership to review the frequency with which multi-agency partnership audits are conducted to improve outcomes for children affected by serious violence. In response and acknowledging the importance of considering the experience of children of all ages, not only those who have gone on in later life to become victims, perpetrators or witnesses of serious violence, a case review approach was adopted to consider provision in Early Help settings.
This approach brought auditors together to participate in multi-agency discussions, to explore the extent to which practitioners in this practice context can prevent escalation of risk, using a recognised best practice approach. Specifically, it considered how widely practice in these settings suggests clear practitioner application of the concept of a ‘reachable, teachable moment’ to support those potentially exposed to the impact of serious violence, reflecting the underpinning ethos employed by Leeds A&E Navigators Team (this link goes to YouTube).
This audit provided the opportunity for auditors to retrospectively review the early experiences of young people who would later become involved in violence; to revisit early contact with them, from primary age onwards, to identify points in their past lives where different interventions would have allowed practitioners to engage with them in a different way, to potentially achieve a different outcome.
Findings arising from analysis of case discussions were the importance of early identification of specific concerns, to prompt an Early Help intervention. Particularly:
- The importance of recognising ‘physical chastisement’ by parents and carers, as causing harm and potentially impacting on future behaviours
- The importance of consistently viewing children and young people experiencing domestic violence as victims ‘in their own right’, requiring targeted, specific, specialist and ongoing support
- The significance of the impact of losing a sibling in traumatic circumstances
- The significance of the impact of living in a chronically abusive environment, where violence is normalised
- The importance of recognising challenging behaviours in early childhood, including violent and aggressive acts, as indicating a vulnerability to becoming involved in serious violence
- The importance of early identification and the provision of support to respond to poor mental health in young people
- The importance of promptly expediting relocation, by housing services, where a current location is deemed to present a safety risk
The findings arising from analysis of completed audit tools very positively presented a series of examples of high quality and positively impactful packages of additional support offered by professionals, following a young person’s engagement in violence in later life, across all settings, and/or at a time where concerns had been escalated. Specifically:
- One to one support is provided, engaging young people and their parents in focused conversations around their specific needs, conversations which led to the creation of robust plans, implemented to achieve positive outcomes.
- A number of the high schools who supported the audit presented a picture of young people in receipt of broad ranging, high level specialist one to one support, often at a time when risk was significant and the challenge dynamic, which was strongly evident as being young person centred and trauma informed.
- School staff indicated that they are keen to be more involved in a shared professional response to serious youth violence and there are opportunities to strengthen information sharing to ensure schools have access to more comprehensive and detailed early intelligence relating to the activities of young people who are moving towards affiliation with gangs, and likely to perpetrate violence. An approach to collaboration underpinned by meaningful partnership willingness to engage with schools, would be an enabler of that earlier offer of help and support to young people.
- The analysis of information relating to children’s earlier years suggested very strongly that younger children who go on to become victims and perpetrators of, or witnesses to, serious violence are not universally (with limited exceptions) in receipt of targeted Early Help support, which is specific, purposeful or focused on violence reduction, which meaningfully considers their culture and ethnicity or which makes the direct connection between early vulnerabilities and later behaviours.
- There was limited evidence presented of assessment or practitioner involvement using an ‘Early Help’ approach for the young people whose cases were reviewed, prior to their involvement in serious violence.
- There are opportunities to reaffirm approaches to ensure that ‘reachable, teachable moments’ are being consistently identified and acted upon in Early Help settings, to prevent escalation of risk, using a recognised best practice model of violence reduction.
The audit identified several recommendations which are being taken forward by the LSCP sub-groups. There is opportunity via the Families First programme to explore future opportunities to work with young children in Early Help settings, where there are early indicators of harm due to exposure or experience of domestic abuse and trauma.
Contextual Safeguarding in Leeds – progress and future opportunities
Since 2022, Leeds Children and Families services have partnered with the Contextual Safeguarding programme at Durham University to develop their inter-agency response to extra-familial harm via design and pilot of a Risk Outside of the Home (ROTH) child protection pathway. The JTAI of Leeds in 2024 in respect of serious violence and criminal exploitation found the ROTH pathway to be an area of strength regarding their developing response.
This partnership has continued throughout 2025/26 where the LSCP has extended to explore other opportunities for greater collaboration and learning to build on existing developments and embed contextual practices across the safeguarding partnership.
In February 2026, a city-wide partnership engagement event took place with a keynote from Professor Carlene Firmin, Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding. The session provided a wide partnership audience with a recap of the Contextual Safeguarding Framework and key implementation features, the ways this has developed in Leeds in recent years and structural implications and cultural facilitators.
The diagnostic reflections for Leeds were:
- Leeds has a ROTH Pathway established which is a core factor of the contextual safeguarding approach which features context weighting.
- There was recognition of the strong emphasis on protective parents as partners, and support in place to achieve this in meetings. There is further work required to support parents facing additional challenges to also collaborate as partners in what can be complex safeguarding structures.
- Work was undertaken to orient plans towards fewer actions focused on specific need-orientated outcomes.
- It identified an apparent division between ‘exploitation’ and ‘serious violence’ pathways in some spaces and associated involvement of youth work.
- In terms of structures and systems, there are multiple meetings in Leeds to focus on practices designed to assess and intervene, some led by police and some by Children’s Social care.
- The extent to which ‘guardianship’ is a feature in discussions varies and the significant youth work capacity in Leeds plays a guardianship role but this is measured in respect of crime prevention and less toward child protection.
The final elements of this work are to be completed during 2026/27 with a reflection and Needs Assessment to understand what is needed further to fully implement Contextual Safeguarding across the city. An options report of actions and recommendations will be provided to enable the LSCP to consider and take forward into 2026/27 and overseen by the Silver MACE sub-group members.