Dr Lesley Deacon is a qualified social worker, and to re-register with Social Work England, she needed to complete a 30-day placement. This was agreed upon and arranged with the Diocesan Safeguarding team, and that this would partly involve the design and implementation of a piece of research for the Diocese.
The aim of the research was to understand the experiences of incumbents, parish safeguarding officers (PSOs) and churchwardens when implementing safeguarding policy into practice within their parish.
The research began through the completion of a scoping review – engaging in informal conversations with a range of incumbents and PSOs across the Diocese.
The research plan for this included the following elements:
- Focus: hear the voices of those who are responsible for implementing safeguarding practice across the Diocese.
- A detailed, mixed methods self-completion online survey was created (print version also available).
- Mixed – including closed question (for measurement) and open questions (for narratives i.e. more detailed explanations).
- The survey link was shared via email through the internal email system for all incumbents, PSOs and churchwardens.
The findings from this research can be found here and the powerpoint presentation, which goes alongside this can be found here.