Voice Tools

This tool has been developed by the North West Multi-Agency Safeguarding, Learning and Support Hub. The content draws on findings from the Multi-Agency Child Safeguarding (MACS) Evaluation, conducted by King’s College London, alongside the expertise of our Participation and Co-Production Leads across the North West region.

It is informed by collaborative work across the North West to identify and share effective practice. The tool can be used alongside the True to Us template.

Please contact the Hub if you would like support in applying this tool within your local arrangements.

Feedback Loop Template

Genuine youth engagement doesn’t end when the conversation does — it continues through meaningful feedback.
Our Youth Engagement Feedback Loop Template is a practical tool designed to help organisations close the loop with the young people and professionals they work with.

This simple, visually engaging template helps you share back what you heard, what’s changing as a result, and what’s next. It promotes transparency and accountability, and shows young people that their voices lead to real action.

How it Works

The template walks you through five key steps:

1. What was the opportunity? – Outline the project or topic young people helped shape.
2. What you told us – Summarise the key themes from youth and professional feedback.
3. What we couldn’t change (and why) – Explain openly where limits existed and manage expectations honestly.
4. What’s happening next – Show the tangible impact of youth input and share next steps or launch details.
5. Thank you – Recognise and appreciate young people’s contributions to build long-term trust and engagement.

Why It Matters

When young people see their ideas lead to change, they’re more likely to stay engaged, feel valued, and continue shaping the services and systems that affect them. T

When involving children and families in reviews — especially in serious or tragic situations — we must: Be kind, honest, and clear. Offer real choices about whether, when, and how they take part. Prioritise creating a safe space – emotionally and physically – where people feel heard and respected.

Reviews are not about scrutinising families — they are about learning from their lived experiences to improve the system. Whether the child has been harmed, died, or there’s been a positive outcome, families deserve to be treated with compassion, clarity, and respect.

The guidance below aims to support safeguarding partnerships in their approach to this work, ensuring that the experiences of children and families remain central to everything we do. By doing so, we can create meaningful conditions for positive systems change.

When we talk about “measuring the impact of voice” within MASA partnerships, we don’t just mean formal data or performance metrics. We’re referring to the information, feedback, insights and patterns that emerge from how babies, children, young people and families (BCYF) experience participation — and how that experience leads to change.

This is not a diagnostic tool or participation benchmark. It’s a thinking framework to help MASAs better understand, evidence and improve how BCYF voice is listened to, acted on, and embedded in strategic and operational planning.

In short:

• What did BCYF share?

• Who heard them?

• What changed as a result?
   

The approach in the below guidance ensures voice is not only gathered — but meaningfully used to influence decisions, unblock issues, and improve safeguarding and support.

Youth Recruitment and Retention Guide

How to get young people to join – and want to stay

Youth Recruitment and Retention Guide teaches Safeguarding Partnerships how to move beyond one-off engagement and tokenistic involvement towards meaningful, inclusive participation that strengthens safeguarding practice. Grounded in children’s rights, co-production, and real-world delivery, it supports partnerships to attract diverse young people, remove barriers to access, and create structures where youth voice is safe, influential, and sustained.

Inside, MASAs will find:

• Clear principles for inclusive youth recruitment aligned with safeguarding responsibilities
• A practical, step-by-step recruitment process for partnership contexts
• Guidance on motivating, recognising, and rewarding young people ethically
• A retention framework focused on trust, belonging, progression, and impact
• Common participation pitfalls in statutory systems — and how to fix them

Whether you’re developing a youth reference group, strengthening participation across agencies, or embedding youth voice into strategic decision-making, this guide equips MASAs with the tools to build participation that young people choose, value, and stay committed to.

The Head, Heart, Hand tool is a simple but powerful reflective framework used to support balanced decision making in safeguarding and participation work. It helps practitioners and partnerships test ideas, policies or actions by considering three equally important perspectives. 

Head (Logical – Understanding, Evidence & Impact) This focuses on whether an idea makes sense. It encourages critical thinking about evidence, safeguarding outcomes and long-term impact. Key questions include whether the approach is appropriate within a multi-agency context and whether it is genuinely in the best interests of babies, children and young people. 

Heart (Emotional – Feelings, Values & Lived Experience) This centres lived experience. It prompts reflection on how babies, children, young people and families might feel about an approach in practice, including what feels caring, reassuring or potentially harmful. This helps ensure decisions are not only procedurally sound but also relational, trauma-informed and respectful. 

Hand (Practical – Action, Delivery & Barriers) This looks at what it will take to make something work. It explores practical challenges, capacity, resources and partnership working, and who may be most affected by implementation barriers. This ensures ideas are realistic and deliverable across agencies. Used together, Head, Heart and Hand help teams avoid one dimensional decision-making, supporting approaches that are evidence-based, emotionally intelligent and practically achievable. The tool is particularly useful in multi-agency safeguarding contexts to slow down thinking, surface different perspectives and strengthen collective accountability.