The CURIOUS® Framework

Why the Same Findings Keep Appearing in Practice Reviews, and What We Can Do About It

If you have ever read a Domestic Abuse Related Death Review, a Safeguarding Adult Review, or a Child Safeguarding Practice Review, you will likely recognise a pattern. The names change. The settings change. The agencies involved change. But the themes that come back, again and again, are the same.

Information held but not shared. Questions not asked. A professional who sensed something was wrong but did not feel able to say so, or did not know how. Individually, people often knew something. Collectively, almost nobody knew everything.

This is not a new observation. It is one of the most consistent findings across practice reviews nationally, and it is the reason The CURIOUS® Framework exists.

A pattern, not a failing

It would be easy to read these reviews as a catalogue of individual mistakes. In my experience, across fourteen years as a registered social worker, including statutory child protection, work as a Children's Guardian and Family Court Adviser, and safeguarding leadership roles across health, education and the voluntary sector, that is rarely the real story.

Most practitioners are skilled, committe but this gives us a shared structure for professional curiosity, something practitioners can reach for in the moment, under pressure, that helps them notice what sits underneath a case, a family, or a conversation, and feel supported in asking the next question.

Where The CURIOUS® Framework comes in

The CURIOUS® Framework was developed directly from this pattern. It is a practitioner-led approach to professional curiosity, built from frontline practice rather than academic theory, and designed to be used in real time, in real casework, by people under real pressure.

It is as much a relational tool as an analytical one. It shapes how practitioners build trust and stay connected with the people they work with, not only how they interpret information, and it gives teams a shared language for talking about that practice together, in supervision and beyond.

I am deliberately not setting out the detail of the framework itself here. It is a registered trade mark, and it has been developed and refined through direct delivery, not as a theoretical exercise, so I want organisations to experience it properly, through training or licensing, rather than piece it together secondhand.

Why it matters now

The themes that keep surfacing in DARDRs, SARs and other practice reviews are not going away on their own. They point to something structural, a gap between what professionals individually notice and what organisations collectively act on. Addressing that gap needs more than another policy or another training slide. It needs a practical, repeatable way of working that holds up when things get busy, uncertain, or difficult.

That is what The CURIOUS® Framework was built to offer, and it is why it has now been delivered across the charity sector, local authority adults' social care, occupational therapy, and beyond, reaching over four hundred practitioners through short form training alone.

Find out more

If you would like to understand more about The CURIOUS® Framework, how it has been used, and how it could support your team or organisation, I would love to hear from you.

Get in touch at hello@risestrong.org.uk to request the full CURIOUS® Framework overview, or to talk through training and licensing options.