New guidance on Keeping Children safe in education has been published September 2020.
It provides a thorough guide to protecting those aged under 18 from a range of issues, including bullying, sexting, substance abuse and FGM.
It highlights the responsibilities of those working with children under 18.
A study, by Edge Hill University, aims to establish the prevalence of abuse and maltreatment experienced by competitive athletes, in their childhood and beyond, in the UK.
This project is being undertaken by Edge Hill University’s Centre for Child Protection and Safeguarding in Sport (CPSS), and is supported by Sport England. The study is the first large-scale survey in the UK to ask competitive athletes about their negative experiences in sport. The data collected will be relevant for everyone working within the sports sector.
For more information click here
If you are interested in supporting this research or hearing more about the process, please contact Dr Mike Hartill, Director of the Centre for Child Protection and Safeguarding in Sport (CPSS), at or 01695 584763.
The release of the new draft inspection framework by Ofsted has implications for schools’ safeguarding procedures.
Safeguarding was a separate judgement in the last framework and ‘the effectiveness of safeguarding procedures’ came under leadership and management. It was also given the status of being a ‘limiting judgement’, so if a school was inadequate against this, then overall effectiveness was likely to be inadequate too.
however in the new framework, limiting judgements no longer exist and safeguarding no longer has its own section. Instead under the leadership and management judgement in the new Ofsted framework, school leaders are required to demonstrate that they ensure that all pupils are safe. Inspectors will be looking for evidence that school leaders and managers at all levels manage safeguarding arrangements to ensure that there is safe recruitment, and that there are effective procedures in place to identify children in need or at risk of significant harm. To qualify as ‘outstanding’ in this aspect of leadership and management, the school’s arrangements for safeguarding pupils must ‘meet statutory requirements and give no cause for concern’. The same phrase is used for ‘good’ and ‘satisfactory’ schools. Schools will register as ‘inadequate’ if safeguarding arrangements do not meet statutory requirements and give serious cause for concern.
It is therefore clear that the emphasis on safeguarding has been reduced in the new evaluation schedule.
Also , under the government’s School health and safety guidance (issued in August 2011) risk assessments do not now have to be completed for every activity. In fact, Health & Safety: Department for Education Advice on Legal Duties and Powers for Local Authorities, Head Teachers, Staff and Governing Bodies emphasises that risk assessments need not be routinely carried out or repeated for similar activities. However, an assessment should be completed for any new activity that includes an element of risk.
The UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency is calling for a database that will store images of abuse appearing on the web. BBC Newsnight highlights the impact not having such a national paedophile database. Britain has a poor ability to identify and rescue child abuse victims compared to most other countries.
Mick Moran, head of child protection at the international police agency Interpol told Newsnight that simply prosecuting those who download images of child sex abuse is not enough. He said that the images need to be sent to a central point where they can be analysed to look for clues to identify the children, but that is not happening in the UK. Mr Moran said some police officers are “forgetting the fact that each of these images, each of these movies, contains a victim”.
In the UK different police forces currently have various systems and different databases. Some have their own victim identification units. However it could be another 18 months before a national system is introduced. Although millions of images of child sex abuse have been collected only 47 cases were passed on to Ceop by the UK’s 52 police forces in 2010 – less than one per force. In the cases which were passed to them Ceop helped rescue 22 victims.
Mick Moran and Mark Williams Thomas have been invited to National Conference on Safeguarding on the Internet , 16th November, Reading.
BBC Panorama – Breaking the Silence tells the story of how over a hundred former pupils from two Catholic prep schools in England and Tanzania were reunited via the internet. Chatting in cyberspace, they discovered they had all suffered terrible abuse at school: mental, physical and, in some cases, sexual. As young children they were frightened into silence by their abusers.
Now, as men in their fifties and sixties, and strengthened by the group, they want the truth to come out. Twenty two men have started legal proceedings against the Rosminian Order for compensation. They want justice, but their abusers are now elderly and the church has sought to mediate a solution.
An insight into the way in which children are manipulated by sex offenders – and also the power of the internet to draw out truth.
The new Police National Database ((PND) will be launched nationally on 23 June 2011. The information held on the PND is not new information but comes from existing force systems that support force intelligence, crime, domestic abuse, child abuse and custody business areas. The PND now offers forces direct access to that information, and details of intelligence about vehicles, locations and events.
A case study demonstrating the benefits for police users working in child protection is available here.
Only Enhanced Disclosures will contain reference to any ‘relevant and proportional information’ held by local police forces, so employers will need to utilise safer recruitment and other HR policies to ensure that people working on the periphery of Regulated Activity are appropriate to do so. Continue reading Launch of Police National Database
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (Ceop) has presented it’s annual report which shows that 414 children were helped, 513 people arrested and 132 offender networks broken up in the UK in the past year. This is a record number of children and a record number of arrests for the centre.
Ceop was set up in 2006 to track online paedophiles and bring them to court. Over a five-year period the agency said it helped to dismantle more than 394 high-risk sex offender networks and arrest 1,644 suspected paedophiles.
According to the report, images on the internet appear to show that younger children are increasingly becoming victims of abuse. But the “great tragedy” is that much child abuse goes unreported, said its chief executive Peter Davies. He added that Ceop was trying to stay ahead of developments in technology, including in the area of social networking sites.
Jon Taylor, an internet safety expert and former police officer who went undercover posing as a 12-year-old girl, said it was relatively easy to pose online – either as a child who may be groomed or as a sexual predator – to “mingle” and find out what people were doing. But he said it was difficult because the internet is not “proactively policed”, and instead reacts to intelligence and information.
Ceop is currently affiliated to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), but is to be merged with the new National Crime Agency when it is formed in 2013.
Safeguarding Matters is organising a conference about the topic in November 2011. Speakers include Mark Williams-Thomas and international police forces. Please register with us to be kept updated on the conference programme.
NSPCC research via a freedom of information request to all 43 police forces in England and Wales show that at least 64 children are sexually abused every day in England and Wales.
For the first time, its research also looked at the age of abusers and found a quarter were aged under 18. One in four victims was aged 11 or under.
A former doctor at Great Ormond Street Hospital has been temporarily suspended from the medical register while being investigated over child abuse claims. Philipp Bonhoeffer, who stopped seeing patients at the London-based hospital in 2009, faces a General Medical Council (GMC) disciplinary hearing, he strongly denies any impropriety or misconduct. Continue reading Doctor suspended pending child abuse hearing
An alliance of Sports Governing Bodies are challenging the new definition of Regulated Activity that is emerging from study of the Protection of Freedoms Bill. Some of the proposed details are open to interpretation and will have significant impact on established practice and policies. For instance :
Barnardo’s has published a report highlighting that children as young as 13 are being released from custody into unsafe or unsuitable accommodation, which can lead to a cycle of homelessness and reoffending. The research found that supported accommodation could provide savings of more than £67,000 per child over a three year period. Continue reading Children leaving custody at risk
The Protection of Freedoms Bill is the first time that a new element called a “Public Reading Stage” will be introduced. It means that members of the public can comment directly on clauses of the Bill. These comments should contribute to the points made by MPs across all parties during the debates and committee stages – so it is an important opportunity.
The website can be found here – http://publicreadingstage.cabinetoffice.gov.uk – do add your perspectives with practical examples from your sector as this a very complex area which has been subject to sweeping misrepresentation in the media. Since only very low level stakeholder engagement is likely this is the best opportunity to amend some aspects of the legislation such as the availability of disclosures, scope of regulated activity and the level of guidance available.
Also register with us so that you receive our briefing papers on each of these topics and more.
The chief executive of the Churches Child Protection Advisory Service (CCPAS), Simon Bass, has highlighted that there are major loopholes in the Protection of Freedoms Bill that will be exploited by those determined to abuse children and vulnerable adults. He said that the Government’s plans to scale back the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) “will make it easier, not harder, for unscrupulous sexual predators to abuse in churches.”
The VBS Remodelling Review document recognises that removing barring arrangements for some activities could give rise to an increase in safeguarding risks. He was concerned that the review gave Sunday-school helpers as an example of where criminal records checks would not be required . He explained that a convicted abuser who is banned from working in a ‘regulated activity’, such as teaching, may, without any checks, alternatively gain access to children through becoming a Sunday-school helper, with potentially devastating consequences. Mr Bass said
“these changes show that the Government is prepared to tolerate a level of risk in churches that we — with long and painful experience of dealing with abusers in church — find unacceptable. We think it inevitable that potential predators will see children in churches as soft targets and will act accordingly.”
He agreed with other commentators that proposals in the Freedom Bill to allow the sharing of CRB checks between employers was “eminently sensible”.
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (Crae) has applied for a judicial review of the refusal by the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, to identify and contact children who may have been unlawfully restrained in privately run secure training centres.
Under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, all prison and probation officers would have been checked and monitored for their ongoing suitablity for the role as prisoners and people on probation would have been considered as being ‘vulnerable adults’. It remains to be clarified whether this promised level of protection will be compromised under the halving of the numbers defined as doing ‘regulated activity’ under the Protection of Freedoms Bill. Continue reading Judicial review of unlawful child restraint
The NHS is failing to treat elderly patients in England with care, dignity and respect, an official report says. Of nearly 9,000 complaints made to the Health Ombudsman last year, 18% were about the care of older people. In total, it accepted 226 cases for investigation – twice as many as for all the other age groups combined. Continue reading NHS fails elderly vulnerable adults
Volunteering England, Fair play for Children, NACRO, NSPCC and Barnados are among those who have commented about the impact of the new disclosure and vetting laws on volunteering. Continue reading Mixed response from voluntary sector
On the day that the changes to the Vetting and Disclosure system were announced, two relevant cases were highlighted. William Mayne, the author who abused his relationships with children after meeting them in schools, and Brixton photographer David Trainer. Continue reading William Mayne, David Trainer
The London Safeguarding Children Board has launched a new set of guidance and tools to help social workers, teachers, police, health workers and other agencies identify and support children who have been trafficked. These children can be subjected to sexual exploitation, enforced labour or drug dealing, sold or forced to commit crime by the organised gangs or individuals who have brought them into the country or trafficked them between cities within the UK. Continue reading New guidance to tackle child trafficking