Professional curiosity

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Some of this information and these documents were developed by Leeds Safeguarding Children Partnership. Thanks are extended to both Leeds Safeguarding Children Partnership and also Wirral Safeguarding Children Partnership for permission to use their information and resources.

What do we mean by Professional curiosity?

Professional curiosity is where a practitioner seeks to explore and understand what is happening in someone's life, rather than making assumptions or accepting what they are told at face value.

It is a combination of looking, listening, asking direct questions, checking out and reflecting on all the information received and not accepting it at face value.

It means:

testing out your professional assumptions about different types of families
triangulating information from different sources to gain a better understanding of family functioning which, in turn, helps to make predictions about what is likely to happen in the future
seeing past the obvious.

There have been situations in Swindon where professionals took a lot of information at face value. This was highlighted in Safeguarding Adult Review Robert and also in Local Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews.

Sometimes practitioners can feel they are being intrusive or that they may be overstepping their role if they ask that extra question, if they consider alternative explanations, if they start contacting others to check out their concerns. This is not the case. Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility.

Professional curiosity is a core responsibility of all practitioners. Many people are unable, or feel unable, to speak up for themselves. Many people are relying on us to identify the signs, to uncover what is really happening in their life, and to provide them with help to be safe.

Below are quotes from a child and a parent who provided evidence for the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel report:

I couldn’t talk about the sexual abuse. It was too difficult. I wanted them to notice and to ask me what was going on.
A mother reported her experience of domestic abuse had prevented her from speaking about her concerns that her child was being sexually abused. She had hoped that practitioners would notice “the fear in her eyes” and see the “red flags” that should have triggered help for her daughter and herself.

Why is Professional curiosity important?

It enables a practitioner to have a holistic view and understanding of what is happening within a family, what life is like for a child, young person or adult at risk and fully assess potential risks.

Professional curiosity means exploring every possible indicator of abuse and neglect and trying to understand what the life of the child or adult is like on a day-to-day basis; their routines, thoughts, feelings and relationships with family members.

In order to be truly curious about a person’s life, professionals also need to maintain an attitude of respectful uncertainty and be professionally interested. This means applying a critical eye to the information given by a parents and carers, rather than just ‘taking their word for it’.

A lack of professional curiosity can lead to missed opportunities to identify less obvious indicators of vulnerability or significant harm.

We know that in the worst circumstances this has resulted in death or serious abuse as confirmed by the learning from case reviews, both nationally and locally where practitioners have responded to presenting issues in isolation.

A lack of professional curiosity is a recurring theme in many local and national reviews.

Some other terms often used interchangeably with "professional curiosity" include respectful uncertainty, healthy skepticism, professional courage, and thinking the unthinkable. They all emphasise the importance of questioning assumptions, seeking deeper understanding, and not accepting information at face value.

How to be professionally curious:

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of families, and do so in an open way, so they know that you are asking to keep the children /adult safe, not to judge or criticise
Be open to the unexpected, and incorporate information that does not support your initial assumptions into your assessment of what life is like for the child/adult in the family
Seek clarity either from the family or other professionals
Be open to challenging, or having challenged, your own assumptions, views and interpretations as to what is happening – triangulate the information you hold
Consider what you see as well as what you’re told. Are there any visual clues as to what life is like, or which don’t triangulate with the information you already hold.

Here are some resources which have some tips for how to be professionally curious:

Useful practice model

The following simple model can be very effective in supporting professional curious practice, and identifying causes for concern.

Look, listen, ask, checkout (Docx)

Supervision and professional curiosity

Supervision is an opportunity to explore cases therefore, practitioners and supervisors should be open to exploring professional curiosity within supervision sessions.

Play devil’s advocate
Present alternative hypotheses
Present cases from the child, young person, adult or another family member’s perspective

Professional curiosity from afar

When making contact with a child, adult or family member on the phone or by video call, the usual clues that help you detect any safeguarding issues, won’t be available to you, meaning that we need to think of more creative ways to identify how we implement professional curiosity.

Here are some tips to help you.

On the phone

Consider asking:

whether they can speak freely
are there other members of the family in the room that can hear the conversation. Asking the person if they can talk openly (closed question), should give you an indication of whether there is the potential for guarded answers to your question. By establishing this at the very beginning you can reduce the pressure on them
can they move to another room? Asking them if they can talk in another room or outside might help them to talk more openly. It may be that you might need to talk another time.
to agree a code word between you and the person you are talking to so you can quickly establish on further meetings whether that person can talk safely and openly

It should be recognised that children, adults or families that cannot talk openly means there may be coercion and controlling behaviour within that family.

Video calls

Consider the following:

Is there anything about what you are seeing which prompts questions or makes you feel uneasy or concerned?
What is the body language telling you?
Are you observing behaviour which is indicative of abuse or neglect?
Does what you are seeing support or contradict what you are being told?

Barriers to professional curiosity

A lack of professional curiosity can lead to missed opportunities to identify less obvious indicators of vulnerability or harm; assumptions made in assessments which are incorrect can lead to the wrong intervention for children, families and adults.

Being professionally curious is not always easy. There may be barriers to this, including those from practitioners themselves such as:

over optimism
making assumptions
lacking the confidence or assertiveness to ask sensitive questions
unconscious bias (as seen in the Child Q CSPR)

Barriers may also be presented by people we work with, such as not wishing to answer questions, questioning a practitioners’ intentions and what some organisations call disguised compliance.

It is important to recognise any potential barriers and work with the child, young person, family or adults to overcome these. Working systemically through building positive, trusting and purposeful relationships with families can help support honest conversations.

Overcoming barriers to professional curiosity

It is only by knowing and challenging these barriers within ourselves and in our practice that we are often able look further, think wider and see more.

Try not to make assumptions. What you should do instead is consider other explanations. Look for the evidence.
Try not to accept the first explanation, as the only possible explanation. What you should do instead is be open minded. Act with 'respectful uncertainty'. Look for information that confirms and challenges it.
Try not to be rigid about what you believe to be true. What you should do instead is be open to new information. New information can come to light that offers an alternative view.
Try not to see an incident, and not the circumstances. What you should do instead is look for the whole picture; look for patterns, is this a one-off event – how do you know?
Try not to take risk for granted. When we get so used to risk, we can see it as normal, and fail to act. What you should do instead is look at risk with a fresh pair of eyes. See it for what it is. Use supervision to re-evaluate your assessment.
Try not to minimise risk because you have limited information. What you should do instead is stay focused on risk. Limited information is common. It is not always possible to know for sure what has happened, but the concern for the person needs to remain.
Try not to be overly optimistic about a person's situation or the help that is being provided. What you should do instead is accept tht sometimes all the right things are said by paid and unpaid carers and services, but there is little or no evidence of change. Consider if progress is really being made? Are intended outcomes actually being achieved?
Try not to focus on the problem and not the person. What you should do instead is always seek to understand the person behind the concern. This will help you to identify the best path forward.
Try not to avoid difficult conversations. What you should do instead is have courage, gain support, use supervision. Plan for difficult conversations, wherever possible. For further guidance see Managing difficult conversations.

Useful resources

Our video archive includes recordings of the workshops below:

SSP Spotlight Child Neglect Professional Curiosity Workshop March 2024
SSP Spotlight on Child Neglect Workshop Having Difficult Conversations

The following documents may also provide further support: