Jon Barnett, Community Safety Team Leader at Warwick District Council, introduces an innovative new project to empower young people and children in Warwickshire. This initiative enables the young people of Warwick to share their experiences within the community, highlight areas where they feel safe or unsafe, and identify key hotspot locations to the Warwick Community Safety Team.

Overview of The Warwick Voice Project

Jon oversees the Community Safety Team, who look at antisocial behaviour, case management and serious violence reduction. He also oversees the community wardens, who are a high visibility presence in hotspots in the local community to detect and deter crime.

The Warwick Community Safety Team are responsible for community engagement. As part of this, they put out community safety surveys to understand the lived experiences of young people in their district and learn how they can make it better. They highlight a big gap in engagement with young people, and that they do not engage with their traditional community surveys. They heard about The Student Voice and felt it would be a gamechanger in understanding the lived experience of young people in school and the community.

Gathering data for community partnership meetings

Jon says he expects a very positive impact. Their focus is on serious violence reduction, and through government-funded prevention partnerships, they have discussions with partners including Warwickshire police about problem areas and the lived experience of young people in the community. Jon says that having that feedback from young people will be very powerful in helping them shape their service delivery, and diversionary activities, including implementation of CCTV and lighting. This is an opportunity for the team to feedback to young people and tell them what they have done, empowering their young people to make a positive impact on their community

The benefit to young people

The anonymous reporting functions will help remove barriers for young people in sharing their lived experiences in the community. Jon shares feedback from other areas that use The Student Voice, who have had a positive impact and Warwick are looking forward to seeing that replicated here in Warwick District.

This interactive reporting platform will help teachers and DSLs focus on specific problem areas and highlight hotspots that may not be known to school staff. Jon shares that schools involved are excited and see the value in the project in safeguarding young people in school and the local community.

Why collaboration between schools, local authorities, and communities is critical in safeguarding children

Jon shares how critical information sharing is in safeguarding, and that agencies can have a lack of confidence in understanding legal information sharing. Determining the project’s success is getting buy-in and engagement from young people to report concerns. Warwick aims for young people’s lived experience to be listened to and actioned. As an example, if there is a green space where young people feel unsafe, young people can share that through The Student Voice, and the Community Safety Team can put interventions in that enhance feelings of safety, and feed that back to students, ensuring their young people feel heard and feel safer from the interventions.