Australia’s Child Wise builds child safeguarding in the UK

Child Wise, an Australian not-for-profit which supports a range of organisations including local government to improve their child safety practices, is now operating in the UK.

The organisation (a social enterprise of Save the Children Australia) does a diverse range of work for local government councils and authorities around the world, ranging from seconding its own staff to work within organisations to act as advisers to reviewing child safe organisational practice, policies and much more. It has also developed a virtual learning system which takes users through examples of scenarios and decision making around child safety.

Child Wise is entering the UK market after recognising that whilst there are many UK companies offering such services for adult care, there are fewer providing services to help assess how safe children are from abuse in council-backed provision.

Natalie Siegel-Brown, Managing Director of Child Wise, welcomed UK local authorities to get in touch to see how the organisation can help, including around reassessing service safety as models of delivery have changed through Covid. “We can’t assume that as we’ve changed services through Covid and post-Covid that everything is fine. These services need to be put through safeguarding checks.

“If councils want to understand how safe their services are and the vulnerability of their service delivery to children and their families we can come in and test the system and provide solutions. You can come to us if you are concerned that you haven’t done that test but if you haven’t asked that question yet then that should be a priority.”

Siegel-Brown said learning through Child Wise’s virtual learning platforms had been shown to work well. “A lot of people, even if they know the basic principles, become paralysed when the situation is in front of them and there is no way to directly translate what was learnt in an online session to what you see."

“Our virtual learning system gives an example of what might happen in a council service provision and the user sees the consequences play out as they make decisions. That type of learning means that when they are in the environment providing services, they have built the neural connections in the brain having previously had the experience of making that decision.”

• To find out more about Child Wise and its services contact: info@childwise.org.au