Your organisation should develop safe ways of working where safeguarding and promoting children’s welfare is embedded into all you do.
Creating a safeguarding culture means embedding safeguarding into everything an organisation does. It doesn’t simply evolve it’s developed over time through your setting’s approach to effective strategy and leadership.
Embedding a safeguarding into the organisation’s culture starts at the very top of the organisation with the senior managers pledging absolute commitment and support, including ensuring the resources are available to make it happen. This commitment cascades through to the staff who know that abuse can and does happen and are prepared to take action if the need arises.
When safeguarding is built-in to all functions and regularly evaluated for effectiveness, both staff and young people fully understand the arrangements that are in place to protect them and feel uninhibited about using them should the need arise. In promoting this culture young people will understand they will be listened to, supported and known action will be taken on their behalf.
This article on the Safeguarding Network website applies a very established organisational development model to how schools and colleges develop a “positive culture and ethos where safeguarding is an important part of everyday life”.
Bond has designed a tool to help leaders assess their organisational culture in relation to safeguarding and develop clear actions
Most organisations have policies and procedures to safeguard children, but they are worthless if staff do not fully understand and follow them. To ensure that your policies and procedures are rooted in all the organisation does, you should:
Be CHILD focussed – Ask yourself what is it like for this child living in this house/family? What is the ‘lived experience’ of this child?
Always be CURIOUS – In challenging times when everyone is trying to do more with less. If we are overwhelmed or weary it is often our curiosity that waivers. Take action: talk with your supervisor or a colleague. If we lack curiosity children are less safe.
COMMUNICATE well – Effective communication helps keep children safe. Ensure your communication with your safeguarding lead, with colleagues, with families, and with children is effective. Poor communication within and between agencies is a red flag/danger zone.
Know your CONTEXT – Adhere to, and regularly review, the safeguarding policies and procedures for your setting.
Be CLEAR about the child’s status – Local reviews have highlighted how not knowing the status of a child has resulted in avoidable mistakes with extremely serious consequences. Be clear: is this child already receiving Early Help, are they a Child in Need or on a child protection plan? Ensure there is clear and timely communication with those already involved.
To download this information please see the 5Cs poster
Information sharing is crucial for effective safeguarding of children and essential for effective identification, assessment, risk management and service provision. Poor information sharing has been identified as a key factor in numerous serious case reviews.
In the Advice for Practitioners on Information Sharing produced by the government they outline the seven golden rules to sharing information as being:
Protection Act 2018 and human rights law are not barriers to justified information sharing, but provide a framework to ensure that personal information about living individuals is shared appropriately.
To support this we have an information sharing framework. This overarching framework which outlines the principles, standards of conduct and bases for using and sharing information by partner organisations working in Portsmouth.