Prof. Carlene Firmin

Professor Carlene Firmin delivering a keynote address at the Vulnerability and Policing: Reducing Harm, Strengthening Justice conference

We’re delighted to get Day 1 of our annual conference underway with Professor @carlenefirmin.bsky.social speaking on the realities of safeguarding young people from extra-familial harm

Professor Carlene Firmin standing at a lectern

We’re delighted to hear next from @carlenefirmin.bsky.social who will be guiding us through Scotland’s road to contextual safeguarding - a concept that involves targeting the social conditions where harm occurs. Thank you to Carlene for delivering this year’s Day 1 keynote address.

#YJConf25

A brilliant morning in Manchester

📢 The British Journal of Social Work Appoints New Co-editors!

Congratulations to @carlenefirmin.bsky.social and @stkong.bsky.social who will officially start in their new role as co-editors on 1 July 2025.

Find out more 🔗 new.basw.co.uk/articles/bri...

Annual conference - Vulnerability and Policing: Reducing Harm, Strengthening Justice - Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre Register for the Centre's annual conference: Vulnerability and Policing: Reducing Harm, Strengthening Justice.

We’re delighted to share our conference programme. As well as @carlenefirmin.bsky.social & Darren McGarvey keynotes, the event includes sessions on gender-based violence, neighbourhood policing, diversion, and lots more!

📅 9-10 Sept 25
📍 Leeds

Register: vulnerabilitypolicing.org.uk/annual-confe...

Really looking forward to this

YouTube video by Youth Endowment Fund Carlene Firmin: Contextual Safeguarding is Common Sense | Safe E1

This week, he launched our "Safe" podcast with @carlenefirmin.bsky.social, diving deep into contextual safeguarding and how we can better protect young people.

Listen now: youtu.be/7wJw9CyIzNI?...

Two photos in a collage - one photo of a screen and says Leading Effective MultiAgency Partnerships to Support Children At Risk of Violence and the second photo is professor Carlene Firmin standing at a lectern speaking to an audience

@youthendowmentfund.org.uk conf today with @nickcookuk.bsky.social

Enjoyed hearing
@carlenefirmin.bsky.social calling for absolute focus on the needs of the child (not the system) & DCS Greenwich (&TCS Trustee) Florence Kroll on the role of kindness & humility in leadership

Lots to reflect on!

📢 Against Youth Violence, the book me and Keir Irwin-Rogers published in 2022, is now fully open access! 📢

Link here:
bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book...

Contents list in image. You can download chapter by chapter, or the whole thing.

Please share!

📣 Registration for the Youth Justice Conference 2025 is now open!

📆 11 and 12 June, 2025, Stirling Court Hotel

Book your place: lnkd.in/e97DbNcW

Our theme is ‘Childhood, Safeguarding and the Children’s Hearing System’ and keynote speakers are @carlenefirmin.bsky.social and Dr Grace Robinson

Really enjoyed writing this article with @carlenefirmin.bsky.social Kate O'brien, Rachael Owens and Donna Garvey on the systemic problems with child welfare systems, problematising mothers, no matter how 'good' they are.

We're live! The call for abstracts is now open for the JUSWA conference June 26-27 2025 at UCLan in Preston, UK. For everyone interested in social work research. Its titled:
Shaping Our Future: Proactive messages from social work practice, education and research

Feeling well, feeling cared for? Using participatory and arts-engaged research to improve understanding and professional responses to the mental health needs of care-experienced young people Care-experienced young people face significant levels of mental distress yet the nature and lived reality of this is poorly understood and undermines the degree to which professional caregivers can...

Another article now out- #actionresearch methods. Pls share. Feeling well, feeling cared for? Using participatory and arts-engaged research to improve understanding and professional responses to the mental health needs of care-experienced young people www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ah thanks Roma. Would love to chat about it when we next meet up xx

Looking forward to reading this - great that it’s open access too.

7. 'Rather than identify and lament the limitations of existing systems we call upon scholars, service leaders, and practitioners to collaborate with the communities and families they serve, and implement the transformational reimagining we know is required'

Have a read and share your thoughts

6. 'Our institutional ethnography invites us to look beyond service performance and instead recommend changes to system purpose'

Without such reform system foundations will continue to shape (and limit) the impact of innovations on service delivery.

5. 'The innovations used, disruptive as they were to service features and facilitative as they were of gradual service improvement, remained frustrated by service foundations. Transformation was required with four foundational assumptions, that service-level innovation alone did not disrupt'

4. We focused on three features of their responses:

Engagement with specific dynamics of EFRH

Ability to support young people through collaborative and trusting relationships

Interagency capabilities

3. We 'examined whether social care organizations could address these challenges by introducing one or more of three innovation frameworks'

Identifying 'the extent to which sites successfully redesigned local systems & the ways their progress was halted, undermined, or otherwise challenged'

2. We note that 'since 2018 policy across the four UK nations has increasingly authorized social work responses to EFRH...Yet, authorizing something to happen, or recommending that it does, is not commensurate with its possibility'

A line in the sand: Moving from surface improvement to foundational shifts to develop effective responses to extra-familial risks and harms This article presents representative accounts from efforts in six social care departments in the UK to use innovation to improve their responses to young p

New year, new article....
one that will shape my work for years to come.

Using a 3 year ethnography
@michellelefevre.bsky.social @klanghoff.bsky.social Gillian Ruch & I draw a line in the sand & call for foundational reform in responses to extra-familial harm

academic.oup.com/bjsw/advance... 🧵

Two Met Police officers convicted for assaulting 16-year-old Black boy - Voice Online PC Gonen is suspended and PC Price remains on restricted duties. Both officers will be sentenced on 24 January

No ambulance available to take a black child to hospital for urgent mental health assessment and care. Police given task instead. Two police officers assault child.
www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news...

Wow thank you so much 🙏🏾

I haven’t really joined in on here yet! But myself and the wonderful Steve Crossley have just wrapped up this terms Abolitionist seminar series 💥 for the Communities and Social Justice research group at Durham Sociology - and it was great! For those of us working in practice reform - a must!

Finally got around to reading this Child of the North report and welcome multiple recommendations around both a #ContextualSafeguarding approach in general & specifically Risk Outside of the Home (ROTH) child protection processes

More calls to meeting need as paramount for providing protection

Thanks so much Michelle - that's very kind

Really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. They mean a lot x

Great paper and thread by @carlenefirmin.bsky.social the absolute expert in navigating the complexities of responding to extra-familial harm. ⬇️