Festival of Learning:

Safeguarding Bumps & Babies This year the Festival of Learning has focused on Safeguarding Bumps and Babies. This was to look at learning around the Safeguarding Children Partnerships of LLR Priority:

"Safeguarding Babies – Improving how we work together with families before and after births to safeguard babies".

Over the course of a week, we had 15 sessions about the safeguarding of the bump and the baby, across Leicester Leicestershire and Rutland: some in person and some online events.

There has been 350 bookings and 300 people joined all events from opening day in Leicester City Hall on 1st November till the online closing event on 7th.

The Festival was introduced by a Key Note speech from Jane Wiffin who looked at Safeguarding Babies and the womb as baby's first home.

The sessions have stretched across the broad spectrum of safeguarding. Looking at services from good quality childcare through to the legal processes of pre-birth assessments and taking children into care.

Alongside this, there has been a focus on different aspects of safeguarding which have been related to bumps and babies, such as domestic abuse (in particular coercive reproduction), parental conflict, drugs and alcohol, safer sleeping, ICON (shaken baby syndrome) and working in a trauma informed way.

Moving forward we are sharing the recordings of the sessions where possible including the filming of the in person opening session with key note speaker and principal social workers of LLR below placed in the program where appropriate and available. We are planning and will soon put new sessions for some of the below sessions in the new year, especially for the events that were oversubscribed. We are also looking at the evaluations to spot where there may have been gaps – and/or suggestions for other learning. However, from a brief glance at the evaluations for the question 'Do you think you will be able to use the learning in your practice' the answer has been a resounding 'Yes' which makes the whole event so important.

Thank you.