At the start of the summer, I wrote a blog about a new Iriss project I’m co-leading, all about professional curiosity in Public Protection. It’s been a few months of intense activity in the project and I’ve really deepened my thinking about the topic; I’ve also been finding many, many connections with the other work I do for Iriss. In particular, I’ve been thinking about my role as the curator and caretaker of the ASPire Hub (the home for Scotland’s Adult Support and Protection – or ASP – resources).
The ASPire Hub launched just over a year ago. In that time, it’s both doubled in size and vastly expanded the breadth of topics within its digital walls. There are resources on human rights, on financial harm, on human trafficking and learning disability. Thinking even just about one of those topics, say financial harm, speaks volumes about who might be involved: social care, the police, health services, housing, banks, advocacy… As the 2023 report put it, Adult Support and Protection is everyone’s business. However, not all of these services will have an equal understanding of what ASP is.
Adult Support and Protection is very outward-looking in Scotland, and there’s a hunger to collaborate and to share knowledge, beyond what’s formally required in legislation and guidance. This has been borne out by the strong interest in the professional curiosity project from the ASP community. Underpinning this is an understanding that information gathered by non-ASP specialists will frequently be vital to keeping adults safer.
But it’s not solely about passing relevant information on. Sticking with the example of financial harm, the professional analysis of someone who works with money every single day can turn a list of numbers into crucial intel on the risk of harm. The patterns that a financial professional can observe, and the hypotheses they develop based on them, offer a perspective outside the knowledge of most social workers. Making these links comes through awareness and teamwork, and using resources such as the seven-minute briefing on Financial Section 10 requests so everyone is clear on their duties.
The forthcoming National Adult Support and Protection Learning and Development Framework for Scotland should help greatly to upskill everyone, regardless of their role. The Framework was written by a multi-agency writing group and informed by a stakeholder reference group (involving 27 national organisations). It was also supported by the National Adult Support and Protection Coordinator, and a consultation exercise with a wide variety of different national agencies has just taken place; already it is obvious just how important multiple professional perspectives are to this work.
The Framework contains information for different workforce levels. This extends all the way to the 'Wider Workforce' - a group that basically covers all who work with adults in Scotland. In recognition of how Adult Support and Protection is everywhere, it sets the expectation that everyone should be able to recognise and respond to concerns about harm (or risk of harm) to an adult. The Framework also points directly to relevant resources for each group. For example, achieving this foundational understanding is supported by watching a webinar that covers all the basics.
Adult Support and Protection rests on everyone’s observations, knowledge and communication skills. It’s about having the professional confidence to tune our antennae into the risk that someone might face, even if it’s not something we work with every day. Anyone may very well hold that missing piece of the jigsaw, and it relies on all of us to work together to fit it into the rest of the puzzle.
