Practitioners Tool Box
The following tools are all referred to in the West Midlands Safeguarding Procedures, but have been gathered here in one place to help practitioners.
West Midlands Safeguarding Procedures – To help you understand what happens when you make/receive a referral, and what to do/what happens in specific circumstances from a multi-agency perspective.
Thresholds Guidance– To help inform your professional judgement if you are worried about a child’s safety and/or well being.
Dispute Resolution/ Escalation Procedures – the process to follow if there is a disagreement between professionals on a case
Neglect toolkit – To help you understand and more effectively take action against neglect.
Graded care profile 2 – More information on a tool that you might consider being trained to use (See the Training Page). The tool will help you work with parents to work out where their childcare is strong and where it requires improvement.
An individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, control, manipulate or deceive a child, young person or adult and exploits them:
a) through violence or the threat of violence, and/or
b) for financial or other advantage of the perpetrator or facilitator and/or
c) in exchange for something the victim needs or wants.
The victim may have been exploited even if the activity appears consensual. Exploitation does not always involve physical contact, it can also occur through the use of technology.
Solihull’s All Age Exploitation Reduction Multi-Agency Safeguarding Procedures and all the appended documents can be found on our local procedures page here.
Parental conflict – to help professionals to consider questions to help them explore the spectrum of conflict that can occur in a relationship and respond appropriately to destructive conflict, situational couple violence and coercion & control
Domestic Abuse – General guidance and information about abuse.
Domestic Abuse Referral Flowchart–To help you make decisions about who to contact and what tools to complete.
Dash – Risk checklist is a tried and tested way to understand risk for an adult. It is based on research about the indicators of high-risk domestic abuse.
Cafcass tool for assessing coercive control – This tool should be used where the Safe Lives DASH has identified elements of coercive and/or controlling behaviour in the relationship in order to assess this dynamic more fully in the context of the application.
Barnardo’s Domestic Violence Risk Identification Matrix – (DVRIM) is a multi-agency tool to assess the risk to children living in household where domestic violence is present.
The tools they may indicate that a referral to MARAC (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference) needs to be made. The referral contact is marac_referrals@west-midlands.pnn.police.uk
FGM Flowchart – A flowchart produced by the Department of Health and Social Care to help you make decisions on which actions to take regarding a case/suspected case/someone at risk of FGM.
FGM Risk Assessment Tool – A tool produced by the Department of Health and Social Care to help professionals assess risk of FGM.