ANDREW AZZOPARDI: I’m a social worker by profession, so the attitude, the approach I adopt is pretty much a social worker approach to supervision. So, there are three primary aims of supervision in social work. The first aim is case management. So, seeing what cases a particular worker has and seeing how much progress or lack of progress is being made on each of the safeguarding incidents, cases, complaints, whatever terminology you use. The second one is personal development. So how the person is reacting and feeling when working in such a difficult and challenging environment where you are constantly talking about abuse in some shape, or form. And the third is professional development.

So where are the areas that the person needs to develop on a practical level, on a clinical level, or on an intellectual or academic level? And for them to have a journey or pathway of where they want to get to in their career. We work with people. We work with systems and in organisations, absolutely, but it’s people who make these systems work. As a supervisor, as a manager, you really need to understand what works for that person.

MANDY JONES: It’s really important to give staff space to really think about what they feel is working. What are the problems that they’re dealing with on the ground? But also, what are the things that we’re learning from, in terms of our very good case management system. So, I think the space to really talk about their work is absolutely crucial. And when it comes to appraising performance and staff work, the idea of what we call this appraisal is called, Let’s Talk, where we have that dialogue about how they are enacting the values of the organisation in the work that they do. It really gives them a chance to connect to the organisation even further.

And I think that really does work, that we’re having a dialogue. It’s not a tick box exercise. That we’re looking at how do they empower. How do they work in an inclusive way? How do they work in a survivor centred way? And according to the work that they do, the responses may be really different, but we’re also looking at ways in which staff are needing support, whether that is in terms of personal development, professional development, but also, I think, support in regards to having the time and the space to reflect on their practice, to reflect on their work and what they’re doing. Absolutely crucial.

PHILIPPA TUBB: We’ve named our reporting system Freedom To Speak Up. And that’s been quite a deliberate naming, because we didn’t want our reporting system known as our whistleblowing system, and all the negative connotations that can go with that word. So, I think, how we, as organisations, how we describe our reporting systems is very important. It might seem just like a nuance of words. But actually, encouraging people to speak out when they’ve got concerns is a really important cultural concept within each organisation. In terms of safeguarding, top-down approaches, in my experience, don’t work. Safeguarding has to come from the bottom and from within organisations.

And if you want to actively develop your safeguarding systems, you’ve really got to listen to staff and students. Listen to frontline programme staff in your organisations, because it’s actually only through listening that we learn and develop our systems.

PAULA GIL: There are other things that didn’t work, you know? At the beginning, when we established the code of conduct, we were sharing the code of conduct with our staff. But we didn’t go into the analysis of what we were saying. So, they didn’t understand why we were doing this, and the concepts behind or the meaning behind concepts as sexual harassment, discrimination, abuse. And at the end, what we realised is that there is a word that is understood, I would say, by everyone in the world. That is respect. So, we focus our messages on this. We need to respect each other, to respect the patients, to respect women.

And I think that this was a good idea to include this concept and it’s working.