This is a model of practice around the area of working with safeguarding and Child protection, developed by Andrew Turnell and Steve Edwards in Western Australia, and many other practitioners including Prof Eileen Munro from the UK, since the 1990's. It is quite widely applied in many areas. We believe that AMBIT can augment and complement this approach very well. You can visit Signs of Safety's helpful website here

For a locality that adopts it, a lot of investment is required to make sure that 'Signs of Safety' becomes embedded and that local services become "enculturated" in its language and procedures; this is rather similar to the adoption of AMBIT.

Mix and match?

An appropriate question, therefore, is whether the adoption of AMBIT in a context where Signs of Safety is already running risks introducing something that could be diluting, or contradicting, of this approach? We do not think this is the case. In fact, at the heart of AMBIT is an explicit sensitivity to avoid such harms - we do take seriously the potential for trainings (like treatments) to have negative side effects so that, the introduction of new ideas or practices may leave a front line worker less confident about how to deal with a particular issue than was the case before the training, or that the training has created an additional confusion about how the new way of working links to wider existing systems. These are clearly unintentional effects of training and hopefully not the main experience but the AMBIT approach takes these possible effects seriously.
In the relationship between Signs of Safety and AMBIT we think this can be avoided for two main reasons.

1. Firstly, AMBIT explicitly sets out to address the Tower of Babel effect described in the first paragraph of the Signs of Safety manual. This states that 'one of the biggest problems that bedevils child protection work, identified in many child death inquiries, is the Tower of Babel problem, where everyone is speaking a different language (Munro, 2002, Reder, Duncan and Gray 1993)'. It is noteworthy that the Tower of Babel effect is highlighted in the first session of all basic AMBIT training and that this problem is addressed through the core AMBIT stance (Core Features of AMBIT) which clearly advocates workers (and AMBIT itself) should Respect local practice and expertise.
2. Secondly, we believe that the relationship between Signs of Safety and AMBIT is likely to be productive and positive as there are a number of core ideas shared by both models, particularly that both approaches emphasise the importance of relationships, the value of team relationships to support learning and the need for network coherence. The following paragraphs illustrate these two themes more fully.

In relation to the case of Signs of Safety, AMBIT addresses a rather wider scope (see Core Features of AMBIT) which extends beyond the focus on safeguarding, and is designed so as to allow and actively encourage and support the local use of an existing model such as this; if Signs of Safety is running successfully in an area, then AMBIT should work at Scaffolding existing relationships and emphasise that in all areas relating to the principle of Managing Risk the existing Signs of Safety protocols are the ones to follow. In such a case, a local service might choose to manualize it's local understandings of practice in this area, replacing or adding to the relevant sections on Managing Risk that you will find in the core content of AMBIT that all teams start with.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The text below is taken from the Signs of Safety Child Protection Practice Framework (2011) and we have added some Links to key elements of material in AMBIT that directly speaks to the same concerns. If you hover your cursor over the links we have added, you will see the title of the page that we have linked (without necessarily having to click on it!) It is reassuring that two models of practice that both emphasise the need to build models from the practice of real teams doing the actual work, actually end up suggesting very similar approaches.

Three core principles of Signs of Safety

Child protection practice and culture tends toward paternalism. This occurs whenever the professional adopts the position that they know what is wrong in the lives of client families and they know what the solutions are to those problems.
A culture of paternalism can be seen as the ‘default’ setting of child protection practice. This is a culture that both further disenfranchises the families that child protection organisations work with and exhausts the front-line professionals that staff them.
Signs of Safety seeks to create a more constructive culture around child protection organisation and practice. Central to this is the use of specific practice tools and processes where professionals and family members can engage with each other in partnership to address situations of child abuse and maltreatment. Three principles underpin Signs of Safety:

3.1 Working relationships

Constructive working relationships between professionals and family members, and between professionals themselves, are the heart and soul of effective practice in situations where children suffer abuse.
A significant body of thinking and research suggests that best outcomes for vulnerable children arise when constructive relationships exist in both these arenas (Cashmore 2002; Department of Health 1995; MacKinnon 1998; Reder et al. 1993; Trotter 2002 and 2006; Walsh 1998). Research with parents and children who have been through the child protection system assert the same finding (Butler & Williamson 1994; Cashmore 2002; Gilligan 2000; Farmer & Owen 1995; Farmer and Pollock 1998; McCullum 1995; MacKinnon 1998; Teoh et al. 2004; Thoburn, Lewis & Shemmings 1995; Westcott 1995; Westcott & Davies 1996). It only takes a few moments reflection to grasp the truth of the assertion that relationships are the bedrock of human change and growth but this reality makes many very nervous in the fraught domain of child protection.
The concern is that when a professional builds a positive relationship with abusive parents that professional will then begin to overlook or minimise the seriousness of the abuse.
The literature describes such relationships as ‘naive’ (Dingwall, 1983) or ‘dangerous’ (Dale et. al. 1986; Calder 2008). While concerns about a relationship-focus in child protection practice usually centre on working with parents, relationships between professionals themselves can be equally, if not more problematic. Child death inquiries consistently describe scenarios where professional relationships and communication are dysfunctional. Meta-analyses of child death inquiries such as Department of Health (2002); Munro (1996 and 1998); Hill (1990); Reder, Duncan & Grey (1993) would suggest that poorly functioning professional relationships of this sort are as concerning as any situation in which a worker overlooks or minimises abusive behaviour in an endeavour to maintain a relationship with a parent.
Any approach to child protection practice that seeks to locate working relationships at the heart of the business needs to do so through a critical examination of what constructive child protection relationships actually look like. Too often, proponents of relationship-grounded, child protection practice have articulated visions of partnership with families and collaboration amongst professionals that are overly simplistic. To be meaningful, it is crucial that descriptions of child protection working relationships closely reflect the typically messy lived experience of the workers, parents, children and other professionals who are doing the difficult business of relating to each other in contested child protection contexts.

3.2 Munro’s maxim: thinking critically, fostering a stance of inquiry

In the contested and anxious environment of child protection casework the paternalistic impulse to establish the truth of any given situation is a constant. As Baistow and colleagues suggest:
Whether or not we think there are absolute perpetrators and absolute victims in child abuse cases, and whether or not we believe in a single uncontaminated ‘truth’ about ‘what happened’, powerful forces pull us towards enacting a script, which offers us these parts and these endings (Baistow et.al. 1995: vi).
The difficulty is that as soon as professionals decide they know the truth about a given situation this begins to fracture working relationships with other professionals and family members, all of whom very likely hold different positions. More than this the professional ceases to think critically and tends to exclude or reinterpret any additional information that doesn’t conform to their original position (English 1996).
Eileen Munro, who is internationally recognized for her work in researching typical errors of practice and reasoning in child protection (Munro 1996: 1998), states:
The single most important factor in minimizing error (in child protection practice) is to admit that you may be wrong (Munro 2002: 141).
Restraining an individual’s natural urge to be definitive and to colonise one particular view of the truth is the constant challenge of the practice leader in the child protection field. Enacting Munro’s maxim requires that all processes that support and inform practice, foster a questioning approach or a spirit of inquiry as the core professional stance of the child protection practitioner.

3.3 Landing grand aspirations in everyday practice

Just about everybody, from taxi drivers to parliamentarians want to tell the child protection worker how to do their job. The problem is most of these people have never knocked on a door to deliver a child abuse allegation to a parent and most of the advice comes off like ‘voices from twenty seven thousand feet’
In an exact parallel to the all-knowing way a paternalistic frontline practitioner approaches a family, supervisors, academics and head office managers have a tendency to try and impose their views on the front-line practice practitioner. At all levels this is ‘command and control social work’ and it rarely delivers a constructive outcome. This command and control approach alienates those at the front-line and erases the notion and expression of their wisdom and knowledge.
Seeking to antidote this problem, Signs of Safety has been developed hand-in-hand with practitioners, first in Western Australia and then in USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland and Japan. In every location the approach has developed more rigour, more skillfulness and greater depth of thinking by finding and documenting practitioner and client descriptions of what on-the-ground good practice with complex and challenging cases looks like is a key to learning.
So, for both models, there is a strong commitment that improvements in practice and outcomes will occur if we can systematically capture the learning that arises from the lived experience of front line workers and families. In AMBIT, this is embraced in the process of web based manualizing of good practice based on team reflection and experience. We see this as entirely consistent with the Signs of Safety programme of supporting on-going development of thinking through clear descriptions of local practice. At the core, both approaches advocate for continuing improvement rather that model compliance as the basis for supporting good practice.