Research Partnership

In April 2024 the National Independent Safeguarding Board was pleased to announce a three-year strategic safeguarding partnership between the Board (NISB) Wales and Manchester Met University. Professor McManus and her team of safeguarding researchers at Man Met have completed a series of research projects over the last 4 years evaluating the effectiveness of multi-agency safeguarding arrangements within Wales. This has resulted in a key partnership being formed entrusting the Man Met team to help maximise safeguarding identification and responses for children and adults in Wales. This research began in 2020 with a study to explore integrated multi-agency operational arrangements across each of the 22 Local Authority areas, which led to a large-scale national evaluation, Shaping the Future of Safeguarding, to determine ‘what good looks like’ within multi-agency safeguarding. This study had three workstreams: exploring practitioner perspectives, understanding experiences and views of those with lived experiences of safeguarding and insights from performance management teams, alongside an analysis of safeguarding metrics collected by Regional Safeguarding Boards (RSBs). After completing the Shaping the Future evaluation, two research project outputs were developed in partnership with the NISB and the RSBs:

• The Collective Safeguarding Responsibility Model: 12Cs
• The National Multi-Agency Safeguarding Performance Framework for Children1

Further separate pieces of work have been commissioned by the NISB to undertake a Thematic Analysis of Child Practice Reviews (CPRs) and Adult Practice Reviews across Wales (APRs)2. These reports focussed on the characteristics of risks, the multi-agency responses, and a review of the quality of the practice reviews themselves. The analysis identified several key priority areas where change is imperative to reduce likelihood of future harm, to improve practice and to strengthen safeguarding systems.