Practice Principles

What are the ‘Practice Principles’?

The TCE Support Programme has been commissioned by the DfE to work with sector and community agencies and organisations, children, young people, parents and carers and cross-government departments to produce a set of principles to respond to child exploitation and extra-familial harm.

Between now and September, TCE will embark on an active programme of consultation to produce principles that are both:

• Multi-dimensional (relating not only to ‘practice’ but also to the wider factors that influence practice, e.g. management, supervision, strategic leadership, commissioning and inspection).
• Multi-agency by design (resonant across all organisations and agencies who work with children and young people, or are custodians of the spaces and places they use, reflecting the shared responsibility of all partners, not only Statutory Safeguarding Partners, to address child exploitation and extra-familial harm).

The Principles will be finalised by December and shared, alongside a number of supporting resources, in early 2023.

TCE learning to date suggests that these Practice Principles will need to accommodate a number of criteria:

• They should aim to promote coherence across the country, but must also be flexible enough to respond to the local context.
• They must be clear enough to make sense across professional agencies, and make sense to children, young people and families, but must not over-simplify the complexity of this work.
• They must complement and add value to existing statutory and non-statutory guidance, professional codes of ethics and policy initiatives.
• They must recognise the considerable strengths and talents across the sector, whilst being ambitious and challenging.
• They must be grounded in evidence, but also able to adapt in light of evolving knowledge.
• Crucially, there must be opportunities for children, young people, their families and the practitioners who serve them to be consulted about the principles.