All things Safeguarding…

Child Protection, Reporting a Concern, Operation Encompass, Online Safety, Sexual behaviours & PREVENT

The safety of children at Georgeham is of paramount importance to us. We are committed to ensuring that all members of our school community will thrive in a safe and happy learning environment.

Keeping your child safe means:

  • The health and safety of all children
  • Making sure that the adults who work here have undergone safety and security checks
  • Protecting children from deliberate harm
  • Being an anti-bullying school
  • Being proactive against racist behaviour
  • Being proactive against attempts to indoctrinate children in to any form of extremism
  • Protecting our children from harassment and discrimination
  • A positive approach to behaviour management
  • Meeting the needs of children with medical conditions
  • Providing first aid
  • Protecting children from drug and substance abuse
  • Children enjoying safe educational visits
  • Caring for children’s personal needs
  • Keeping children safe when using the internet and making sure they are aware of online bullying.
  • Making sure our school is secure and safe
  • Being a ‘listening school’
  • Ensuring they know who to go in school if they have a problem

All our staff and governors have had specific training and are proficient in all aspects of Child Protection. We also have a designated child protection officer and two deputies. They are all fully trained in current child protection practices and are responsible for child protection throughout the school.

Our school environment is regularly monitored to ensure the right balance between managed risk and safety. Through our PSHE programme, we teach the children about safety and how to recognise the ‘danger-signs’ of feeling unsafe. We make sure that all children know and can talk about the people in school they can turn to if they feel unsafe.

We work closely with outside agencies whenever there are concerns and we follow strict protocols for reporting Safeguarding issues. We are legally bound to refer Child Protection concerns to Devon’s Safeguarding Hub / Social Care. We may inform parents of our concerns before we make phone calls, however there are occasions when a referral has to be made without informing the family beforehand.

The Designated Safeguarding staff at school are: Kevin Fry and Emma Hill.

Childline

How to report a concern

CEOP (Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre) helps to keep children safe from sexual abuse and grooming online. They are able to help and give advice. You can also make a report directly to them if something has happened online which has made you feel unsafe, scared or worried. www.ceop.gov.uk.

Childline provides a free, private and confidential service for advice and support online and over the phone on 0800 1111

Anonymously and confidentially report child sexual abuse content and non-photographic child sexual abuse images via the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) via https://report.iwf.org.uk/en.

Online content which incites hatred on the grounds of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender can be reported to True Vision at www.report-it.org.uk.

You can report online terrorism related content to the police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit at www.gov.uk/report-terrorism.

Further support and advice can be gained by accessing Devon’s Safeguarding Board’s website

You can also talk to an advisor by calling Devon’s Safeguarding Hub on 0345 155 1071

Concerns can also be discussed with our Designated Safeguarding Leads.

Operation Encompass

Operation Encompass (link) is a national early intervention safeguarding partnership between Police and Education which supports children and young people exposed to domestic abuse.

This partnership ensures that the local police force contacts the school prior to the start of the next school day, when a child or young person has been exposed to, or involved in, any domestic incident so that schools can make sure that specific and tailored provision is put in place before the child and family arrive at school the next morning.

How to Keep Children Safe Online: E-Safety…

It is crucial that children learn to balance the benefits offered by technology with a critical awareness of their own and other’s online behaviour, and develop effective strategies for staying safe and making a positive contribution online, this forms an important part of our curriculum.

Things you can do at home

It is important to talk regularly with your child about staying safe online.

The following websites contain further advice for starting the conversation with your child about staying safe online.

Setting up parenting controls

Being safe online isn’t just about telling a child not to chat with a stranger, or not to give away personal information, it’s also about controlling what a child has access to. There’s some good content out there (“How do you make slime?”) but there’s also an awful lot of content I’m sure you don’t want your child to stumble across. And it really is only one or two clicks away.

Advice about setting up parental controls can be found here.

Online safety guides for parents and carers

Maintaining a knowledge of popular apps, games and platforms, what they do and potential safety risks enables us to have meaningful discussions with our children about their online activities.

The online safety guides below provide both platform specific guidance and general online safety advice with easy to follow information to support conversations between adults and children.

There are many, many more guides that could be useful for you by creating an account with National Online Safety, but here are some good and also recent guides.

  • Tips for open discussion about our digitial live -link-
  • Staying safe on new devices -link-
  • Online saftety for under 5s -link-
  • How to combat online bullying -link-
  • Social Media and Mental Health -link-
  • Building Cyber resilience -link-
  • What you need to know about TikTok -link-
  • What you need to know about YouTube Kids -link-
  • What you need to know about Discord -link-
  • What you need to know about Mineraft -link-
  • What you need to know about Steam -link-
  • What you need to know about Google Chromebooks -link-
  • What you need to know about Roblox -link-
  • What you need to know about Call of Duty -link-
  • What you need to know about setting up new apps -link-

Acceptable User Agreement
Digital technology has become integral to our lives and is used throughout school in many elements of a child’s education. We establish ground rules so that everyone is aware of their responsibilites and to ensure everyone’s safety. We use Acceptable Use Agreements to ensure that everyone is aware of their responsibilities in keeping themselves and others safe. Please click below to see what these are.

Helping our pupils understand how to stay safe online forms part of our safeguarding obligation towards children. Children are expected to follow our SMART rules in school, at home and whilst mobile to make sure they stay safe online.

KidSMART

Keep Smart!

S. Keep Safe… Don’t give out personal information.
M. Don’t Meet Up…Never meet up with an online friend.
A. Accepting things… Don’t open mail, texts or photos from people you don’t know.
R. Reliable… Beware – people might not be who they say they are.
T. Tell Someone… Always tell an adult if you feel uncomfortable or worried.

We’ve provided some links below to websites and resources which we think are useful to parents when navigating the wide world of e-safety and all that it means in today’s online world.

Below are a series of links to online resources you may find useful as parents:

Sexual Behaviour

Knowing how to recognise and respond to age appropriate behaviours in children helps to support the development of healthy sexual behaviour and protect children from harm or abuse.

The best thing we can do here is to direct you to Parents Protect, a website full of resources on many and various aspects, including what’s considered to be normal behaviour, sexting and social networking.

You may want to click through to these helpful documents that we’ve downloaded for you…

Prevent Duty…

The Prevent duty states that all schools have to have due regard to preventing people being drawn into terrorism.

In order to protect our children we, and you, must be alert to any reason for concern in the child’s life at home or elsewhere. This includes an awareness of the expression of extremist views. The government has defined extremism in the Prevent strategy as: “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British Values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”

British Values are a set of four values introduced to help keep children safe and promote their welfare and they are firmly embedded in the work that we carry out at school.

  • Democracy: making decisions together, for example giving opportunities to develop enquiring minds in an atmosphere where questions are valued.
  • Rule of law: understanding that rules matter, as cited in our PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Emotional) and our SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural) programmes of study, and also our SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) programme, that all helps our children to understand and create rules and codes of behaviour.
  • Individual liberty: freedom for all, for example reflecting on their differences and understanding that we are free to have opinions that may be different to others.
  • Mutual respect and tolerance: treat others as you want to be treated, for example sharing and respecting other’s opinions.

This prevention forms part of our safeguarding of the children in our school and our school policy on safeguarding can be found on our Policies and Useful Documents page.

You can also find advice on the Devon and Cornwall Police website

If you would like to discuss any of this, please come and talk to Mr Gower… head@georgeham-primary.devon.sch.uk