Training, Consultancy and Speaking Engagements

Our team regularly deliver keynote addresses and conference workshops/presentations, nationally and internationally, and are always happy to consider requests for this.

We regularly provide consultancy advice to areas and services seeking to review and enhance their responses to abuse, and can develop bespoke consultancy packages tailored to your needs.

We offer bespoke half, full day and multi-day training packages on a range of topics including:

• Peer-on-peer abuse
• Safeguarding children in schools
• Child sexual exploitation/sexual harm
• Trafficking
• Participation of children and young people
• Research methodologies
• Evaluation approaches
• Researching sensitive issues and engaging marginalised populations
• Research ethics

We also offer a number of Masters accredited modules that we can deliver to groups of staff on a commissioned basis. This includes a 15 credit unit on child sexual exploitation and associated forms of harm, a 15 credit unit on Contextual Safeguarding and a 30 credit combined course. We also offer opportunities for individuals to join our Masters students on our units; these are usually in the Spring term and are advertised on twitter.

For any queries about training, presentations or consultancy on all other areas of our work please email: SYLRC@beds.ac.uk

Evaluation

The Safer Young Lives Research Centre specialises in the evaluation of child protection and safeguarding systems and services, drawing out learning both at national policy level and for practice. We adopt primarily theory-driven methodologies such as realist evaluation and theory of change that recognise the role of context, the importance of individual agency and that capture the complexities of social intervention and systems change.

Throughout our evaluation research, we prioritise partnership and iterative learning in the co-creation of knowledge about what works and for whom. For this reason, we often adopt a formative as well as summative approach in order to bring process learning to project and service development as well as outcomes and impact assessment.

We specialise in participatory approaches to research and value the role that those with lived experience bring to evaluating services. We are particularly focussed on the development of co-produced approaches to measuring the outcomes of intervention in order that services continually learn from the experiences of those engaging with them.

Some examples of projects delivered by our team of experienced evaluation specialists are as follows:

• ‘Out There: Rescue and Response’ A contextual safeguarding evaluation of a pan -London safeguarding response to children who are criminally exploited via county lines, funded by MOPAC (2019 – 2021 current).
• Leicestershire County Council and Barnardo’s - Children’s Innovation Partnership: Evaluation Partner (May 2019- July 2020).
• Harris, J., Tinarwo, M., and Ramanathan, R. (2020) Leeds Partners in Practice: Reimagining child welfare services for the 21^st Final evaluation report. Department for Education.
• Bovarnick, S. and Cody, C. (2020) ‘They need to see the people they are affecting by their decision-making’: Developing participatory advocacy with young people on sexual violence in Albania, Moldova and Serbia. Monitoring and Evaluation Report: Our Voices Too Youth Advocacy project.
• Evaluation of Centre of Expertise for Child Sexual Abuse. March 2018 – May 2020. University of Beds. Funded by the Home Office.
• Allnock, D. & Peace, D. (2018, unpublished) Evaluation of the Police Transformation Fund regional network of coordinators and analysts. Luton: University of Bedfordshire.
• Evaluation of the Alexi Project ‘Hub and Spoke’ programme of CSE service development. Sept 2013 – Sept 2017.
• Allnock, D. & Wager, N. (2016) Victim Support's adult survivors of child sexual abuse project: an evaluation of a co-created service delivery model. Luton: University of Bedfordshire.

In addition to designing and delivering evaluation research we also offer consultancy and training in evaluation methods. For all services relating to evaluation please contact:

E: sylrc@beds.ac.uk