Safeguarding in Schools: An Educator’s Guide
Table of Contents
It doesn’t matter if you’re a teaching assistant, the headmaster or the cleaner. If you work in a school, you'll be required to abide by your organisation's safeguarding policies.
In education, safeguarding refers to the rules schools put in place to honour their duty of care to their pupils. Safeguarding policies promote the welfare of children in order to prevent harm. They also put clear processes in place for helping children who are being abused in any way.
At Teaching Personnel, we require all our registered candidates to have completed a free course of safeguarding and child protection training before they can work in schools. To help our newer educators prepare for their training, we’ve put together this brief overview of safeguarding policies and why they matter.
Why is safeguarding important in schools?
It is a sobering statistic that one in five adults in the UK report suffering physical abuse as children. Today’s young people deserve to be spared the debilitating effects of this kind of maltreatment. But without robust policies and protocols embedded in settings like schools and colleges, children are left open to exploitation and harm.
Safeguarding rules give educational staff a framework for action. This clarity should give educators the confidence to meaningfully intervene when a child is being victimised.
What are the key principles of safeguarding?
The Department for Education’s statutory guidance sets out four headline objectives for safeguarding and child protection policies:
- Protecting children from maltreatment
- Preventing the impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development
- Ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
- Taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes
As you can see, preventing or halting abuse is not the only consideration in effective safeguarding. Educators should also strive to create positive cultures that allow pupils to happily see out their full potentials. However, this should not distract from the real and pressing need to understand and identify abuse in children.
What constitutes child abuse?
One challenge for educators looking to stop a suspected case of maltreatment is knowing exactly what amounts to abuse. Some parents will wave away such accusations by claiming that the whistleblower simply doesn’t understand their particular context. They might also claim that their actions are just part of the warp and weft of robust discipline.
To overcome this kind of obfuscation, educators should remember that there are four categories of abuse. These are:
- Physical abuse: any act that intentionally cause physical harm
- Emotional abuse: ongoing emotional maltreatment that has an adverse impact on a child’s development
- Sexual abuse: coercing or enticing a child to engage in sexual activities or exposing them to media of a sexual nature
- Neglect: persistently failing to meet the child’s basic needs
There are also some highly-specific subtypes of abuse that fall within – or straddle - these categories. These include child trafficking, honour-based violence, female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage.
Identifying abuse in children
With such a broad spectrum of abusive behaviours, educators need to be attuned to their various possible manifestations.
Some general indicators of abuse or mistreatment include obsessive behaviour, self-harm, delayed development, missing school, aggression, anxious or clingy behaviour, soiling clothes or wetting the bed, and reporting frequent nightmares.
This is a pretty wide set of signals, many of which will also occur in children with happy home lives. Educators must use their discretion before seizing on any of them as surefire confirmation of abuse.
Digging down into the four categories of abuse, child development experts propose some specific signs for each of them that educators should be alert to.
Indicators of physical abuse in children
Children experiencing physical abuse may present with fractures and broken bones, bruises, bite marks, burns or scalds, respiratory problems and symptoms consistent with poisoning.
Bruises are fairly normal in toddlers learning to walk. But bruising in young children and infants that occurs in clusters. or on softer parts of the body like the buttocks, should set off alarm bells.
A girl who has been subjected to FGM may encounter problems moving without pain or using the toilet. A child at risk of FGM might mention going abroad for a ‘special ceremony’.
Indicators of sexual abuse in children
Children experiencing sexual abuse may engage in inappropriate behaviour with other children or use language that you wouldn’t expect them to know.
Another major indicator of sexual abuse is a clear distress or fear at the idea of being around a particular adult, especially alone.
Signs of neglect in children
Neglect is both one of the most prevalent forms of abuse and the one that can be hardest to spot. Poor physical hygiene and an unkempt appearance can be tell-tale signs of neglect. If a child is displaying ongoing health problems for which they are not receiving treatment, or if they are missing routine health appointments like vaccinations, there may also be cause for concern.
You can learn more about the various indicators of child abuse on the NSPCC’s website here.
How to report child abuse
If you suspect a child is experiencing abuse, it is imperative that you act as soon as possible.
In situations where you have reason to believe that a child is in immediate danger, you should call the emergency services. If there is no immediate threat to the child’s life or health, report the issue to the school’s designated safeguarding lead.
Even if you don’t have any concrete evidence of abuse, it is still recommended that you file a report. Any report will be documented and could be used as evidence further down the line when a case has solidified.
What to do if a child tells you they’re being abused
If a child comes to you to report abuse, it’s very important to take them seriously. Children rarely lie about abuse, so you should never downplay their concerns or minimise what they’re telling you. Instead, you should give them the time and space to describe what’s happening to them. Take care to reassure them that they won’t get into any trouble.
Whatever you do, don't promise the child that you won’t tell anyone else about the abuse. At some point, you will have to. Breaches of trust, even if well-intentioned, can cause children genuine distress that reverberates throughout their lives.
Safeguarding in the digital era
As anyone who works with young people knows, under-18s are often extremely digital-savvy. Unfortunately, this generation’s immersion in online technology creates a new dimension of potential harms.
The biggest threats to children online include:
- Cyberbullying
- Adult predators
- ‘Doxxing’ (having your private details shared)
- Phishing scams
- Accidentally downloading malware
Effective digital safeguarding relies on making sure that both children and adults are properly clued up on the risks of online activity. The NSPCC recommends the TEAM framework for protecting children online:
- Talk: engage children in honest conversation about their online life
- Explore: build up some familiarity with the sites and apps they use
- Agree: establish some basic rules and limits of their internet use
- Manage: set up some parental controls and general use settings
If you suspect that online abuse is taking place, report it immediately. Gather as much evidence as possible, such as screenshots that you can send to the relevant websites and messaging platforms.
If a child is being cyberbullied by a peer, let the school safeguarding lead know; they will almost certainly have protocols for dealing with cyberbullying.
Take your free safeguarding course
Children’s safety and wellbeing is our top priority at Teaching Personnel. That’s why we require all our registered educators to complete an accredited online course in safeguarding and child protection training every year as a condition of working in schools.
If you have not already completed your safeguarding training for this year, click here to take the free course.
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