Child safeguarding experts place the voice of the child front and centre

Learning from serious case reviews

There is little that places children’s social work practice into sharper focus than serious case reviews. In the first four months of this year, NSPCC has reported 18 reviews of cases involving the serious neglect, abuse and in some cases the tragic deaths of children, young people and very young infants.^[1] The learning and recommendations across serious case reviews are call for better information sharing, improved multi-agency working, and more curious questioning by practitioners. Another frequent recommendation is to put the child’s lived experience at the forefront of thinking and practice.

Importance of the child’s voice

Periodically NSPCC publishes a review of learning from serious case reviews; in the most recent of these, for 2019-2023, the majority of recommendations stress the importance of the child’s voice. ^[2] The report emphasises that children communicate in different ways and practitioners need to adapt their practice so as not to exclude those who might experience a barrier to communication, such as a disability, language need, age or developmental stage. To this we might add a more general observation that the ability to vocalise feelings or experiences that feel raw or scary or shaming or overwhelming is something that anyone of any age or any situation would struggle with. Add to this that practitioners can lack the time or the skills needed to enable this level of communication from a child.

Ascertainable wishes and feelings

Since the Children Act of 1989 it has been necessary for practitioners in safeguarding to provide evidence that ‘the ascertainable wishes and feelings of the child, in light of their age and understanding’ have been sought and recorded. This was reiterated in the Children Act 2004 and further elaborated in statutory guidance, ‘Working together to safeguard children 2023’. Yet the message persists from serious case reviews for more focus on the child’s lived experience.

A 2025 case review recommends that workers:

ensure that the voice and lived experience of children, including those who are unable to fully communicate verbally, are always included in agencies’ actions and assessments.

Another states that practitioners should:

seek and obtain children’s voices through methods appropriate to their age and level of understanding

Over a quarter of a century since the Children Act and we are still saying the same things.

Making change happen

When a problem is as pervasive as the failure to seek, hear and act upon the voice of the child in safeguarding, there is a need for positive responses. We knew this back in 2015 when we were designing and building a tool to make it easier to evidence the voice of the child. At that time the idea that an app could assist in children’s participation was new and radical. Ten years on, Mind Of My Own software is no longer new, but during that time our own learning has developed hugely. Now, as then, we do not seek to replace personal interactions between social worker and young person, nor do we claim that our software is the answer. What we do claim, confidently, is that our software is a significant part of the answer, for these reasons:

Software that enables voice of the child

• Young people expect to use digital tools, see them as normal and not novel
• Most commonly young people use a mobile device to access the apps, which means they can communicate in their own space, at their own pace and at times that suit them (see Lundy model)
• The content has been carefully co-designed with children and practitioners over many years, providing unobtrusive, youth-friendly prompts that assist the young person in organising their thoughts
• When a child or young person has something really difficult to say they can be assured of being able to do so in privacy
• The statement that is created by a child using the app is both saved to the child’s account and sent to the trusted practitioner for uploading to the case record – all in the child’s own words, with no mediation from anyone else
• Any child or young person who struggles with literacy or whose first language is not English is supported by the additional accessibility feature. This enables instant translation into over 150 languages with text-to-speech for more than 60.

Keep the child in child protection

A modest investment of time in understanding how to promote Mind Of My Own software to children and young people can result in saving social work time in the longer term. No more handwritten notes to be typed up back at the desk. Instead the statement is ready made for uploading to the case management system at the press of a button.

The expert training team at Mind Of My Own will kickstart the skills acquisition needed to get the most out of the apps for your organisation. Refresher training is always available and your account manager is on hand to help you maintain high levels of usage across the young people in your organisation.

Mind Of My Own has dedicated ten years to advancing the voice of the child. We still believe it never stops being important. With you our digital solutions can keep the child in child protection.

[1] https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/case-reviews/recently-published-case-reviews Accessed 1 May 2025

[2] https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/practice-points-series/voice-child Accessed 1 May 2025