Safeguarding
Thursday 6th February 2025
Did you know that Safer Internet Day is next Tuesday? This year, on 11th February, the theme is Too Good to be True? Protecting Yourself and Others from Scams Online. As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, the internet is a fantastic resource for so many reasons, but it also the Wild West in many others. I think the most prevalent risk online is the scam. You might be thinking back to the days of the Nigerian Prince scam of the early internet, but there are actually two important points to note about this: the world of online scams have evolved dramatically since then, and the old Nigerian Prince scam (also known as the Advance Fee scam - If you help me by sending $1000 now, I will send you $1 million next week) still exists, and rakes in a whopping $700,000 (around £565,000) every year accourding to \ 2019 study. The good news, however, is that there are some handy steps you can take to help keep yourself and your children safer online.
Here is a handy guide produced by the National College on what parents need to know about scams and fake news. Please have a read to get a better understanding of some common scams, and what you can do about them. The image doesn't display brilliantly on some devices, so I have also attached a PDF.
Friday 6th December 2024
This week, I wanted to use the safeguarding blog to talk about Young Carers. What does it mean? Who might it involve? Why is it a group that the DSL team monitor?
According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Young Carers and Young Adult Carers:
"A Young Carer is someone aged under 18 who cares for a friend or familly member who, due to illness, disability, a mental health problem, or an alcohol or substance misuse problem, cannot cope without the Young Carer's support."
According to the Carers Trust, the school census in June recorded 54,000 children identified as Young Carers in England, although, as Andrew Hall points out, this is likely to be a "significant underestimation." This would equate to 0.6% of the school population. Although I will not give specific details of our own school here, if that percentage held true for us, it would mean approximately two children were Young Carers here.
As you can imagine, the stress and pressure caused by being a Young Carer can be a lot for a child to take on board. Our role as a school is to ensure that Young Carers are provided with appropriate support. This could be internally provided such as through nurture sessions, informal check-ins or before and after school club provision. Equally, through referral this could be provided externally, such as through Buckinghamshire Council's Young Carers, the school nursing team or Early Help.
The identification of a child as a Young Carer is not something that we publicise as a school and, critically, is something that is without any form of judgement to a family or individual. As with all of safeguarding, our priority is to ensure that the child is safe, happy and able to experience their childhood to the full. Where external agencies are contacted or referred to, this is to ensure that we are fulfilling our duty of care to all.
So what should you do if you think a child might meet the Young Carer criteria? Whether the child in question is your own or another who you are aware of, you can let the school's safeguarding team know so that we can ensure that we are supporting as best as we can. We have now set up a new safeguarding team email address which will directly alert me (Mr Owens) as the DSL and the Deputy DSLs (Mr Aziz, Mrs Galloway and Mr Ball) so that you can confidentially contact us without going through the office. This is through safeguarding@longcrendon.bucks.sch.uk. Again, this is about providing support and not about reporting one another. A massive barrier that we have to safeguarding in a school is the stigma associated with asking for help. I can personally guarantee that any reports to DSLs are kept on a need-to-know basis, a core tenet of effective safeguarding practice. Meaning you do not need to be concerned about it "getting out."
The process of raising something to the DSL team, or to the local authority directly, is worth a post of it's own, so I will leave that here for this week!
Monday 25th November 2024
As we approach Christmas, I wanted to share the following with you all about dangerous gifts for your awareness.
From Andrew Hall, Safeguarding Consultant:
December is on the horizon. Families around the country are already putting up Christmas trees and tinsel is starting to grace our high streets. Before long mince pies, Mariah Carey and mysteriously familiar Santa Clauses will make their way into our lives. This is all in good fun, and children from Lands End to John O'Groats look forward to the build up to Christmas all year. However, not all presents are created equally. More than ever our Christmas shopping is done online from an increasingly varied list of providers. From imitation manufacturers, to sellers platforms like Etsy and to third party small businesses that use known provider logistics services, we're all trusting people ever further removed from us to provide high quality goods. Unfortunately this is far from guaranteed. Production firms abroad or within a 'cottage industry' may not have the strict manufacturing standards applied in the UK, or expected as industry standard. The Child Accident Prevention Trust has published a list of eight gifts most likely to cause an accident this year. If interested please follow the link below. It's always important to remember that prevention is always better than repairing.
Hall, A. (2024) Email to Gareth Owens. 25 November.
Here is the link to the list: https://capt.org.uk/8-dangerous-gifts-to-avoid-this-christmas/ Please note, this is an external link that was safe and appropriate at the time of recommendation. Long Crendon School cannot take responsibility for the content of external sites.
Friday 22nd November 2024
This week, I wanted to use the safeguarding update to talk about safety. One of our three rules is Be Safe and one of my daily questions is "Are the children safe?" so safety is central to what we do as a school. But what do we mean?
Keeping children safe is a core element of a school's responsibilities and statutory duties. In fact, there are only two functions of school that every member of staff is personally legally accountable for: safeguarding and health and safety, both of which are cornerstones of keeping children safe.
I have explored our role in safeguarding children in previous newsletters, but I wanted to again share its definition, according to Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE, 2024), our legal framework for this:
- providing help and support to meet the needs of children as soon as problems emerge
- protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online
- preventing the impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development
- ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
- taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes
Keeping Children Safe in Education (DfE, 2024, p7)
By this definition, you can see why everything we do with regards to monitoring, supporting and liaising is a part in keeping children safe.
In addition to this, our curriculum includes character development through PSHE and RE, which further enhances children's understanding of what safety means, how they can keep themselves safe and how they promote safety for others. In addition, our forest school provision gives children the opportunity to build independence and take managed risks, furthering their ability to manage their own safety.
Health and safety - the bane of many adults - is the other half of this. In school, there are the educational elements of this woven into our curriculum again, such as first aid and personal safety. We also look at our site, practices and staff to ensure that we are doing everything we can to make our school a safe environment. Whether that is cleaning spilled water as quickly as possible or regularly monitoring the potential trip hazards around the site.
I hope that this short update gives more information on our basic principles of safety in school.
Friday 8th November 2024
This week's safeguarding blog will focus on bullying.
An often-used term in schools, but what does it actually mean? And how do we deal with it? Bullying is incredibly rare at our school but our procedures are robust.
Day-to-day disagreements are, unfortunately, a fact of life and an important part of growing up. Through their social engagement with one another now, children learn skills that will take them forward into their adult life, such as negotiation and compromise. In these scenarios, our role as adults is to either give children the space to find their own resolutions, intervene or model and scaffold social strategies.
However, sometimes cases can escalate beyond this, which is where we may consider using the term bullying. In our Behaviour and Anti-bullying policy, we define bullying as:
"the repetitive, intentional harming of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power.
Bullying is therefore:
- Deliberately hurtful
- Repeated, often over a period of time"
Behaviour and Anti-bullying policy
It is really important to consider this definition when we think about whether something is or isn't bullying. Often, children will confuse a single playground disagreement as an example of bullying, when this would not meet this criteria.
So what happens when we suspect bullying at our school? Whenever any member of our school community - most often children, parents or staff members - describe an incident or situation as bullying, we consider this to be an allegation. Mr Owens or Mr Aziz will appoint an investigator (usually Mr Aziz although this could be any teacher) to look into the allegation, speak to witnesses and those involved to establish if the allegation can be confirmed.
The investigation seeks to establish the three elements of our definition:
- The existence of a power imbalance - this could be real or perceived, such as an age gap, a difference in group size or perceived social status ("the popular kid/group")
- Intent to hurt or upset - evidence that the behaviour was deliberately intended to hurt the other person, be this physically, emotionally or otherwise
- Continuous time period - we look to establish if the behaviour has been happening over a period of time
If all three elements can be established, then we follow our bullying procedures to ensure that we address and tackle the issue swiftly.
Where all three cannot be established, we will manage this as through our normal behaviour procedures.