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Lived Experience Of Children

The right of a child or young person to be heard is included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and reinforced by national legislation and guidance. Working Together 2023 makes it clear that one of the core principles of effective safeguarding practice is a child centred approach
which aims to understand children’s lived experiences and seeks their views about their lives and circumstances (Department for Education, 2023)

Case reviews highlight that professionals often face challenges around hearing and acting upon what children are telling them.

Key issues include: children not being seen frequently enough or asked about their views and feelings, barriers to seeing children not being adequately challenged and difficulties in correctly understanding and reflecting upon the child’s voice.

The NSPCC has published a summary of learning for improved practice around the voice of the child.

Practitioners often use tools to enable them to seek the views of children or to aid participation, enabling children to draw or write their views more freely than in direct conversation. It is important to note that tools are not intended to replace other good practice.

Practitioners need to plan ahead and adapt tools to suit individual children & young people or circumstances. 

A wide range of tools are available to encourage us all and help with our direct work with children and young people. Please exercise professional judgement and discuss any tools utilised with line manager -  as they do not fit all children or all circumstances.

The tools below are examples that may assist practitioners to gather the lived experience of a child.

If your organisation uses a tool or aware of a website that you believe would be of benefit to other practitioners across the borough, please email the 

safeguardingchildrenpartnership@sthelens.gov.uk

  • Three Houses use questions from the signs of safety model exploring worries, strengths and goals. (Templates for the three houses can be obtained from socialworkerstoolbox.*)

  • The Wizard and the Fairy tool serves the same purpose as the Three Houses Tool, but with different pictorial representation. Rather than Three Houses, you can explore the same three questions, using a drawing of a fairy with a magic wand or a Wizard figure. The same process for using the three houses tool applies in using the Wizard/Fairy tool. (Practitioner can present the child with a pre-drawn outline or begin with a blank page and draw the wizard or fairy from scratch, asking the child to help, depending on what best suits the young person)

  • The Safety House template is a tool to help children describe what their home and family life needs to look like in order to for them to feel safe.
    The information collected throughout the Safety House exercise can be used to inform the safety planning process, so that the child has a voice in this process and their wishes and feelings can help shape ‘what needs to happen’.

Websites* for further resources to support direct work:

Free social work resources & tools for direct work with children and adults (socialworkerstoolbox.com) contains worksheets, booklets, advice sheets etc for direct work with children and families 

Free Anxiety Tools and Resources www.anxietyhelpbox.com 

Free Emotions/Feelings Resources & Tools: FeelingsHelpBox.com 

* St Helens SCP is not responsible for the content of external websites