Bridging the Gap: How NSPCC Use Widgit Symbols to Support Sensitive Conversations

We are children’s services practitioners, working within a local NSPCC project called ‘Together for Childhood’, a place-based evaluated approach with the aim of preventing child sexual abuse. We are lucky to work collaboratively with local partners to design and create lots of new resources, and using Widgit has enabled us to make everything more accessible for children, young people and parents/carers with a wide variety of needs.

For example, we have created a ‘Navigating Puberty’ guide for parents and carers of children and young people who have learning disabilities, which is now freely available to download on the NSPCC and Widgit websites.

We have also created a series of symbolised educational resources which explore the changes that happen during puberty. These resources have been co-created with local professionals and parents/carers for use with children and young people who have additional needs and disabilities.

As well as working closely with our local partners to develop resources, we also work directly with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. Having access to Widgit has allowed us to adapt and amend existing resources to support understanding of vital topics such as private parts, consent, and healthy relationships. This has helped to improve children and young people’s engagement in the assessment and intervention sessions that we provide as part of our service.

Having access to Widgit across the organisation has been really valuable, as it has encouraged lots of different individuals and teams to consider how using symbols within their resources can make them more accessible and/or appropriate for a wide variety of needs.

Widgit is so intuitive and flexible; it is difficult to identify the most valuable features, as everything is great! However, being able to choose the most appropriate Widgit symbol for specific words, and even being able to insert your own symbols and images, has been helpful when creating resources. In particular, it is useful that there are symbols relevant to our work (i.e. abuse) which are appropriate for use with children and young people, whilst still being clear about the meaning.

We strongly believe that a key component in the prevention of child sexual abuse is working alongside parents and carers. Therefore, we are always striving to create resources that are meaningful to parents and carers, and often seek their feedback throughout the development of any resources. Parents and carers have provided lots of positive feedback about the symbolised resources that we have created so far; they have expressed that Widgit Symbols have supported them talking to their children about lots of ‘tricky’ but important topics, which helped facilitate important discussions.