Children and Young peoples Plan - Be Safe

Making York the best place where children and young people can grow up.

	Below are the key messages that came out of the consultation around the theme of staying safe. If you want to know more about what people told us you can download a longer summary for the 'staying safe' section.

Key Messages

Safety

The issue was raised that safety should not reduce opportunities for children and young people. Need to make sure that all agencies work together for community safety, with targets working together.

Road safety:

There is support for road safety lessons within the school day. Some issues raised about rail safety. Much support for more cycle facilities.

Bullying

Much has been achieved work needs to continue. There were some specific concerns raised about homophobic bullying, bullying based on race and culture and cyber bullying.

Domestic Abuse

Domestic violence linked to a range of social concerns such as truancy, anti-social behaviour, youth offending, alcohol and drug misuse and engagement by young people in risk taking behaviours. Need to develop a range of services and specific training for professionals to fully meet their needs as well as the needs of their parents.

Children's Centres

Consultation has shown support for Children’s Centres with calls for better links to more parenting support; more play activities, community engagement and for Children’s Centres to continue the links with Health Services.

Prevention

There was a call for clearer definitions of what is meant by prevention and early intervention. (This is currently being reviewed – see separate YorOK Board Paper).

As part of this, the concept of the Yor-OK Community needs some clarification. This community is seen as the whole community working together to support children. But clearer definition of what that actually means is needed. For the YorOk community to be successful there needs to be additional support for community development.

Common Assessment Framework

Practitioners wanted more support about the introduction of this system and the beneficial effects of the system for individual children to be highlighted. A key aspect was seen to be work with parents. Aligned with this was a greater streamlining about enquiries about concerns.

Improve professional identification of and responses to sexual abuse (including by young people), so that systems, inter-agency work can be joined up.