(a)

Together for Childhood was a 10 year multi-agency project run in Ernesettle which was co-led between Plymouth City Council and the NSPCC; the aim was to try and build resilience in the community to prevent child abuse happening, to create a place where children felt safe to disclose abuse and where perpetrators didn’t feel safe to act;

(b)

the five building blocks of the project included:

·          

Relationships and sex education

·          

Community engagement

·          

Trauma informed system

·          

Public health messaging

·          

Preventing offending and harmful sexual behaviour

(c)

for the past two years the project had been in an active delivery mode and 1900 individuals had been engaged with since April 2019; a wide range of work had been undertaken including workshops with young children to identify what was important to them, a collection of women in the community knitting pairs of pants to go on Build a Bear’s,  inter-generational work involving young people from the youth group and Tea and Toast group and the integration of the team into the community;

(d)

the Pants campaign was due to be launched on 28 September 2019 at the Life Centre;

(e)

the project was successful in being awarded a three year funding grant from the Samworth Foundation of just under £280,000. This money would go towards focusing on peer to peer abuse and restorative approaches;

(f)

work would be undertaken with the Safeguarding Board and Safer Plymouth to undertake a system wide harmful sexual behaviour audit. This would identify strengths and weaknesses and what could be done to address them;

(g)

a schools service called the Speak Out Stay Safe programme was run by the NSPCC and had reached 93% of schools in Plymouth.

(h)

the Together for Childhood project was using a child sexual abuse matrix which consisted of a public health approach and primary, secondary and tertiary prevention to target interventions in the right area;.

(i)

the project had a 10 year lifespan however it was hoped that work would continue after this timeframe, led by the community, to continue to generate ideas and work to prevent child abuse;

(j)

the youth parliament were due to join with young people from the Together for Childhood project to think about safe spaces; scoping for this piece of work was yet to be completed however it was hoped that with time, ideas would be discussed, tested and developed;

(k)

the NSPCC selected four sites nationally for the Together for Childhood project; Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent were to focus on the prevention of child sexual abuse and Grimsby and Govan (Glasgow) were to focus on families facing multi adversity; learning was shared across the four sites however it was highlighted that Plymouth had significantly more reach numbers. This was attributed to the Ernesettle community that had actively participated and helped with the success of the project to date;

(l)

one element of the Pants Campaign, Speak Out Stay Safe, was to encourage children to disclose abuse; it was recognised that in some cases there were barriers of disclosure, including a fear of not being believed, however by working with adults in the community and the professional network it was hoped that this would help.