AN OVERVIEW OF SAFEGUARDING IN SCHOOL

‘Safeguarding Children’, quite simply, means keeping children and young people safe. It includes but is not limited to child protection, to abuse and neglect, but covers wellbeing, and many issues and concerns faced by children and young people, aiming to ensure that they grow up happily, healthily, safely and able to achieve their full adult potential.

The school embraces its legal duty of care towards the children, and has developed policies and practical procedures to help us to keep the children safe.

All staff attend regular safeguarding and child protection training. We have a strong, proactive safeguarding team of three ‘DSLs’ (Designated Safeguarding Leads). Gabrielle Shinton is the Lead DSL, with Sarah Brocklehurst and Andy Hayward-Rutter as the alternate DSLs. The designated trustee for safeguarding is Lucy Parker.

The DSLs are available to support and provide information and advice to the children, parents and staff and to deal with any concerns. They work closely with families and external agencies in order to provide the best outcomes for the children and their families. The DSLs meet regularly and have a constant open dialogue about safeguarding issues that may affect children across the school- from Kindergarten to Upper School- everything from recruiting staff, handling concerns about children’s welfare and safety, to internet safety or making sure that the children are dressed appropriately for the weather.

Please click on our Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy to download a copy.

All other key policies including those that relate to safeguarding, such as the anti-bullying policy, can be found on our Key Policies and procedures page.

CONTEXTUAL SAFEGUARDING

Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to safeguarding that helps us to recognise and respond to harm that children and young people may experience outside of the home. From July to September 2022, the DSLs carried out a whole school survey to help form picture of contextual safeguarding for our pupils.  A copy of the report from this research can be viewed here.

OPERATION ENCOMPASS

We are working in partnership with Norfolk Constabulary and Norfolk Children’s Services to identify and provide appropriate support to pupils who have experienced domestic violence in their household; this scheme is called Operation Encompass.  In order to achieve this, Norfolk Children’s Advice and Duty Service will share police information of all domestic incidents where one of our pupils has been present with the Designated Safeguarding Lead(s). On receipt of any information, the Designated Safeguarding Lead will decide on the appropriate support the child requires, this could be silent or overt. All information sharing and resulting actions will be undertaken in accordance with the ‘Norfolk Joint Agency Protocol for Domestic Abuse – Notifications to Schools’. We will record this information and store this information in accordance with the record keeping procedures outlined in this policy.

FURTHER INFORMATION (useful links):