tribute to strengthening the overall system. Save the Children’s Child Protection Systems Guidance for Country Offices, produced in 2019, is of particular relevance in supporting Save the Children staff and partners to work with child protection systems. It provides a definition, and overview of key components and their interrelatedness, pulls together lessons learned in Child Protection Systems programming in both humanitarian and development contexts, key principles, cross cutting issues and details of the eight components. The guidance supports country offices in determining the most relevant strategies and roles they can play to strengthen the child protection system in their context and provides guidance on monitoring and evaluating their work in this area.1e:T6a2,

The aim of this research, commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and carried out by a team from the University of East Anglia, was to seek children and young people’s views of the child protection system and to consider how those views might contribute to improving responses to abuse and neglect. It aimed to gather the views of children and young people living with their parents, who all had a child protection plan in place.Three key findings emerged from this research:

Children develop their own ways of dealing with their worries and these need to be understood;
Their relationship with their social worker is fundamental and assists them to participate in the child protection process; and
social workers need to be aware of the impact of the child protection system itself on children as well as the risk of harm from the abuse which brought them into the system.

Key recommendations for government are:

Good skills in communicating with children, based on detailed knowledge of child development, are needed in order to form meaningful relationships with children. Child development and child-centred communication skills should therefore be a key focus of social work