Professional curiosity is one of the most important skills in safeguarding practice — and one of the most commonly identified failures when things go wrong. Serious case reviews across the country have repeatedly highlighted the same pattern: workers held significant concerns but did not follow them up, accepted surface-level explanations, or focused on the immediately visible problem rather than asking what lay underneath.
Professional curiosity means more than being curious. It means having the skills, confidence, and organisational backing to ask better questions, look further, and not accept explanations at face value when something does not add up.
This module builds on Professional Curiosity: Asking Better Questions from Subject 3, applying the concept specifically to safeguarding contexts. It draws on guidance from the Norfolk Safeguarding Adults Board, which has developed some of the most practical resources on professional curiosity for frontline practitioners.
This is a Developing-level module within Subject 4: Safeguarding.