Monday 8 June – Friday 19 June 2026
Westmorland and Furness Safeguarding Children Partnership with support from Children's Services and our wider partners are holding a Partnership Practice Fortnight on Child Sexual Abuse. Across the fortnight, practitioners from across the partnership will have access to a range of learning opportunities, including practical guidance, and up to date information on local pathways and support services. The sessions will focus on recognising CSA, responding effectively, increasing practitioner confidence and ensuring children and families receive the right help at the right time.
Attendance is open to practitioners from partner agencies of WFSCP. To register your interest, scan the QR code / follow the link and tick which sessions you would like to attend.
The sessions are:
- CSA Partnership Practice Fortnight Launch
- Reign Collective CSA Lived Experience (In person)
- Supporting victims of CSA (Input from Birchall Trust)
- CSA Signs and Indicators (CSA Centre)
- CSA Response Pathway (CSA Centre)
- Identifying and Responding to Harmful Sexual Behaviour (YJS)
- Local and National Learning re: CSA
- Communicating with Children with Disabilities about CSA
- Bridgeway Sexual Abuse Referral Centre (SARC) service input
- CSA Learning Session - Mock ICPC
- Achieving Best Evidence (Input from Police)
- Online CSA (Input from Police)
WFSCP Child Sexual Abuse Practice Fortnight – Fill in form
Following your submission of the form, a calendar invite will be sent to you for each session. Please accept the invite to confirm your place. If the invitation is not accepted by 1st June, we will unfortunately need to offer your place to someone else.
Please sign up early to avoid disappointment, numbers are strictly limited for our face to face session with Reign Collective on Monday 9 June.
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Children’s Services have launched the Together in Practice Framework, and we’d love for you to join us to learn more about what this means for how Children’s Services practitioners who interact with and support children and families across Westmorland and Furness.
This session is suitable for any practitioner or partner agency working with children and families in Westmorland and Furness. Together, we’ll explore how we can ensure a consistent, collaborative approach in the way we engage and work with children and families in our area.
📅 Wednesday 20 May🕐12:30 - 14:00pm 📍MS Teams
To sign up, please email: wfscptraining@cumbria.gov.uk with your full name, job title, organisation & email address.
This full-day, in-person training is open to all staff, including support and frontline teams. It explores how trauma impacts the brain, body, and behaviour and how adopting a trauma-informed approach can improve the way we support individuals, communities, and each other at work.
Participants will reflect on applying trauma-informed principles in their own practice, services, and organisations.
📅 Tuesday 2 June 🕐09:00 - 16:30pm 📍Kendal Town Hall
To sign up, please email: wfscptraining@cumbria.gov.uk with your full name, job title, organisation & email address.
Westmorland and Furness Safeguarding Children Partnership (WFSCP) and Cumberland Safeguarding Children Partnership (CSCP) are pleased to welcome Recovery Steps to deliver this important training, which follows on from learning identified in recent local reviews.
This session explores the impact of parental drug and alcohol use on children and young people, drawing on learning from recent local reviews. It aims to strengthen practitioners’ understanding, confidence and multi‑agency responses when supporting families affected by substance use.
📅 Thursday 11 June 🕐09:00 - 12:30pm 📍MS Teams
To sign up, please email: wfscptraining@cumbria.gov.uk with your full name, job title, organisation & email address.
This powerful and thought-provoking multi-agency training shares Tom’s voice—the voice of a child who lived through domestic abuse and tragically lost his mother to it. Developed as part of a Domestic Homicide Review, this session gives practitioners a rare and moving insight into the lived experience of children impacted by parental domestic abuse.
Using Tom’s own words, the training promotes child-centred, trauma-informed practice, encouraging professionals to reflect deeply on how domestic abuse, coercive control, and neglect affect children’s emotional wellbeing and development.
📅 Tuesday 5 May 🕐09:00 - 13:00pm 📍Kendal Town Hall
To sign up, please email: wfscptraining@cumbria.gov.uk with your full name, job title, organisation & email address.
Please see below details of upcoming training sessions delivered by the Centre of Expertise for Child Sexual Abuse. These sessions are taking place over the coming weeks and still have availability.
Child Sexual Abuse: The Response Pathway
One in ten children in England and Wales will experience some form of child sexual abuse before the age of 16, yet most of this abuse is currently not identified or responded to. While surveys indicate that sexual abuse is as common as other forms of childhood abuse, it is much less likely to be identified by professionals.
Those working with children need a clear understanding of the specific actions and processes they should follow when they have concerns of child sexual abuse. To support professionals in this, the CSA Centre has created the Child Sexual Abuse Response Pathway (Response Pathway), an interactive online resource to guide them through how they can protect and support children and their families when there are concerns of sexual abuse.
This one-hour webinar will help professionals learn how to start using the Child Sexual Abuse Response Pathway | CSA Centre in practice, and empower them to understand the role they, and their colleagues, can play to best protect and support children. The session gives advice and examples of how to use the Response Pathway and explains how it supports professionals to meet the needs of children and their families.
21 April 2026 - Click here to book your place - 21.04.26
10 June 2026 - Click here to book your place - 10.06.26
An introduction to Intra-familial child sexual abuse, taking a multi-agency approach
This one-day introductory course is designed for professionals who work in collaboration with other agencies, to provide an overview of the key issues to support them in identifying and responding to cases of intra-familial child sexual abuse. Target audience as above and including front line practitioners.
The training aims are to achieve a better understanding of:
- the scale and nature of child sexual abuse
- how the impact of child sexual abuse presents in children and young people
- how children communicate their experiences of sexual abuse and the professional role in helping them do this how and why sexual abuse happens in families.
- Greater confidence in identifying and responding to concerns of intra-familial child sexual abuse.
- Improved ability to identify the potential signs and indicators of sexual abuse and sexually abusive behaviour.
27 April 2026 - Click here to book your place - 27.04.26
21 May 2026 - Click here to book your place 21.05.26
24 June 2026 - Click here to book your place 24.06.26
Webinar: communicating with children who have experienced child sexual abuse – For foster carers, kinship carers, adopters and social workers who support them
We know that it can take many years for a child to get to the point where they feel able to tell someone about their experiences of sexual abuse. It is vital that anyone who works with children knows how to recognise what is happening and understands how to help the child have that conversation.
This one-hour webinar aims to help you to understand what you can do to help children by putting our Communicating-with-children-guide.pdf into practice. In this session we will explain what may be going on for children when they are being sexually abused, what prevents them from talking about their abuse, and what those around children can do to help children speak about what is happening.
29 April 2026 - Click here to book your place 29.04.26
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The newly elected Westmorland and Furness MYP is Oscar. The Youth Parliament is a non‑party‑political body enabling 11–18‑year‑olds to represent the views and priorities of young people at both regional and national levels.
Three Deputies were voted in to represent each area:
Eden: Freya
South Lakes: Ava
Furness: Charlie
Oscar's manifesto focused on reducing homework, and improving careers advice resources, setting out his key priorities for improving the lives of young people locally, and highlighting the importance of championing young people’s voices and delivering meaningful change across the area.
Other key topics raised during the event included safe places for young people to go, improving public transport, vaping awareness, mental health & self harm awareness, access to jobs for teens, better political understanding for 16 & 17 year olds, improved access to specialized healthcare, each reflecting the issues most important to local young people.
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Following the death of a young person, an investigation has highlighted concerns about two specific online games: Doki Doki Literature Club and Omori. These have been flagged as containing themes associated with suicide.
Doki Doki Literature Club has been around since 2017. The theme of the game is a psychological horror game that involves heavy use of breaking the fourth wall whereby the player can make decisions to influence the outcome. It has multiple outcomes which include issues of mental health, particularly suicide. The game uncovers suicidal thoughts that the players have. The imagery is particularly appealing to the younger generation. Omori adopts a similar theme and has been around since 2020.
The Guardian has published a news story about an increase in the number of children reporting online sexual extortion attempts in the UK. In 2025 the Report Remove service, run by the NSPCC and the Internet Watch Foundation, received 394 reports from children related to blackmail attempts following being manipulated into sending sexual images to offenders, 34% higher than in 2024. The figures show boys aged 14- to 17 accounted for 98% of the children being blackmailed. The news story includes calls for anti-nudity detection to be made mandatory on devices.
Read the news story: Children in UK report online sextortion attempts in record numbers
See also on NSPCC Learning: Podcast: Protecting boys from financially motivated sexual extortion
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