Safeguarding Practice Forum – Supervision as a Safeguarding Safeguard: From Compliance to Culture
🏷️ FOC for SACPA Members, Non-Members £20
🎧 Safeguarding Leads, DSLs / DDSLs, Social Work Managers, Charity and Faith Sector Leaders, Education and Residential Settings and Trustees and Governors
📍 Online
🎥 Join live
Course outline:
The SACPA Safeguarding Practice Forums are free networking sessions available exclusively to SACPA members. Aligned with SACPA’s mission to support safeguarding professionals, these monthly forums create a dedicated space for sharing knowledge, insights, and mutual encouragement.
Each session brings together safeguarding leads, practitioners, senior leaders, trustees, and governors to engage in meaningful discussion around a focused safeguarding theme. These virtual gatherings offer a valuable opportunity to stay connected, informed, and inspired within a supportive professional community.
Participation is open to SACPA members who have registered and received confirmation through our online booking system. If you are not already a SACPA member and want to benefit from networking with other safeguarding leads, did you know that professional membership pays for itself in as little as two out of the ten scheduled safeguarding practice forum sessions per year? You may want to browse our membership page.
Why Supervision Matters in Safeguarding.
Effective safeguarding does not happen through policy alone, it happens through reflective, accountable and emotionally intelligent supervision. This practice forum explores supervision as a protective mechanism in its own right, strengthening decision-making, professional curiosity, safer culture and organisational resilience.
The findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) emphasised that safeguarding failures were rarely due to policy gaps alone but were rooted in weak organisational culture and insufficient leadership oversight, highlighting that effective, reflective supervision is a critical leadership mechanism to ensure accountability, professional challenge and a culture where safeguarding concerns are surfaced rather than silenced.
Aims of the forum
- To explore supervision as a core safeguarding control, not an administrative task
- To examine how poor or absent supervision contributes to safeguarding failures
- To strengthen understanding of reflective, restorative and accountable supervision models
- To connect supervision to safer organisational culture
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- Articulate why supervision is central to safeguarding effectiveness
- Identify red flags in supervisory systems
- Apply reflective questioning to complex safeguarding cases
- Understand how supervision mitigates risk, drift and professional isolation
Speaker:
Bethany Newman, Founder, Safeguarding Supervision
Bethany Newman is an experienced safeguarding professional and Founder of Safeguarding Supervision. An NSPCC Qualified Supervisor, she combines academic excellence with extensive frontline experience. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Bristol, a PGCE from Cambridge University, and a Masters in Education, with research focusing on physical restraint and affluent neglect. Bethany is also a certified Senior Mental Health Lead. A former Deputy Head and Designated Safeguarding Lead, she delivers trauma-informed training that supports safeguarding professionals to lead with clarity and compassion.
Dr Mariya Ali, Director, SACPA
Mariya Ali is Director of SACPA and an internationally recognised safeguarding and child protection expert. With over two decades’ multidisciplinary experience in legal, academic, advisory, and leadership roles, she is strongly committed to advancing child rights and welfare. Formerly Deputy Minister in the Maldives, she led national reforms in child protection policy and legislation. Internationally, she has worked with UNICEF, Save the Children, and Lumos Foundation on child sexual abuse, exploitation, and systems reform across South Asia and beyond. An academic and practitioner, Mariya has published widely and specialises in trauma-informed, survivor-centred, and systems-based safeguarding approaches.
