What is Safeguarding?

Many people think that the words Safeguarding and Child Protection mean the same thing. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘Promoting Welfare’ are relatively new terms. They were brought into practice with the Children Act 2004 and are much wider used than Child Protection. Child Protection forms just a small part of Safeguarding and Promoting Welfare.

• The statutory definition of Safeguarding and Promoting Welfare is:
• Protecting children from maltreatment;
• Preventing impairment of children’s health or development;
• Ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care;
• Undertaking that role so as to enable those children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully.

Safeguarding covers a wide range of activities and actions taken by a number of different people and agencies. By ‘Safeguarding’ we mean 3 main types of activities:

• Specific action to identify and protect children;
• Activities directly designed to identify and support children who are vulnerable to poor outcomes and life chances;
• Ways to improve the general health and wellbeing of all children.

Safeguarding is about keeping children safe at all times.

Safeguarding at Smarden Primary School

At Smarden Primary Academy, we believe that all Staff and Volunteers should provide a caring, positive, safe and stimulating environment that promotes the social, physical and moral development of every child. We are fully committed to ensuring that consistent, effective safeguarding procedures are in place to support families, children and staff at our school.

All of our Governors and our Staff at Smarden Primary Academy share the objective to help keep the children safe by contributing to:

• Providing a safe environment for them to learn;
• Identifying children who are suffering or likely to suffer significant harm and taking appropriate action with the aim of making sure that they are kept safe both at home and in the education setting.

To achieve this, we:

• Aim to prevent unsuitable people from working with the children;
• Promote safe practice and challenge any poor or unsafe practice ;
• Identify instances where there are grounds for concern about a child’s welfare and initiate or take appropriate action to keep them safe;
• Contribute to effective partnership working between all those involved in providing services for our children.
• Ensure our staff and Governors have regular and updated safeguarding training.

Safeguarding Staff

All adults in our school have a responsibility for Safeguarding. All staff have completed Safeguarding Awareness Training, led by the school Designated Safeguarding Lead and TKAT Senior Safeguarding Lead, as well as refresher online training. The most recent whole school staff training took place in September 2018 and October 2018. All staff Safeguarding training is recorded for school records.

If you are concerned about any Safeguarding issues, please come and speak to one of our Safeguarding Leads. We currently have 2 trained Designated Safeguarding Leads:

Mrs Claudia Miller - Designated Safeguarding Lead

Mrs Samantha Rivolta – Designated Safeguarding Lead

Lucy Farrington leads Safeguarding on behalf of our Governors. Part of Lucy’s role is to challenge our procedures and policies, ensuring that we are effectively safeguarding all of our pupils.

At School we have a Single Central Record (SCR) to ensure all staff and volunteers have the required checks and certificates. Our Single Central Record is managed by the Business Manager to ensure this record updated and ensures all of the necessary qualifications and documents are in place.

Visitors

All adults in school are required to wear a Smarden Primary Academy identification badge, and they must sign in at the school office to receive this.

All staff, governors, students and volunteers undertake a DBS check and details of these checks are kept in a single central record in school.

If you have concerns

Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional) or neglect can have a damaging effect on a child’s health, educational attainment and emotional well-being. Some changes in a child’s behaviour may not necessarily indicate that a child is suffering abuse or neglect. In some cases those changes may be symptoms of a hidden disability, undiagnosed medical condition or changes in medication.

If you become concerned about:

•  Comments made by a child
•  Marks or bruising on a child
• Changes in a child’s behaviour
• Changes in a child’s appearance

Please report these concerns to our Safeguarding Lead or one of the Safeguarding Team.

If you are concerned about safety of an activity or any aspect within school, please also report it to our Safeguarding Lead or one of the Safeguarding Team.

If you have concerns, please do NOT decide to do nothing or leave our school without telling anyone.

Policies

All the policies in school are kept centrally, the safeguarding policy is reviewed annually and its related policies and practices are reviewed regularly. Our practices and policies reflect the guidance outlined in "Keeping Children Safe in Education" (2018)

PANTS - NSPCC Advice for Parents

Being a parent always seems to mean lots of worrying, especially when it comes to keeping your child or children safe.

All parents worry about different types of abuse and how to talk to their children about some of these issues.

The NSPCC have a really useful website called 'Talk Pants.' This site teaches children important messages, like their body belongs to them and they should tell an adult if they're upset or worried. There are activities for children on there and also advice for parents.

Below you will see a link to the website and also a leaflet for parents providing some useful advice.

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/underwear-rule/