Safeguarding Children, Teachers and Schools From Abuse

Since the Royal Commission’s report on child abuse in 2017 (1), Australia’s school leaders have been asked to focus more on how to manage child safety.

Here are some important tips on how to safeguard children and respond to incidents that occur.

Know Your Areas of Risk

Recruitment and Onboarding New Staff
If an organisation undergoes a lot of staff change, its recruitment processes will come under increased strain, and there may be pressure to dilute standards or to widen the pool of available candidates to expedite filling roles.

Maintaining strong screening and selection practices designed to screen for abuse risk is an organisation’s first line of defense in controlling who has access to children and vulnerable adults.

Similarly, to deploy new staff to frontline roles as quickly as possible, there may be pressure to shorten or forego onboarding or training around safeguarding issues, or even pressure on the delivery of ongoing safeguarding training and monitoring, due to personnel shortages or timetabling limitations.  In these cases, consider a blended learning approach with scalable and flexible training delivery formats such as online courses combined with brief in-person meetings and reminders.

Staff Redeployment
Staff may be redeployed, often at very short notice, into new or additional roles and functions and appropriate training and monitoring could be deprioritized. This has the potential for decreased or compromised monitoring and supervision.

Safeguarding tip: Remember to integrate role-specific training for all team members. Supervisors should also incorporate structured check-ins, program observations, and consider surveys as a means to gather valuable feedback from consumers and their families.

Staff Turnover
As experienced staff retire or move on, much of the knowledge about safeguarding practices could go with them, and it is essential that such knowledge is captured and stored. (Re)assignment of roles and responsibilities for safeguarding checking, training, and reporting policies and procedures should be kept under close review.

Get Ahead
The need to implement strong safeguarding protocols for children, and to embed these within a school’s culture, is paramount.  Plan properly for each scenario, ensuring there are designated point people within the organization who have a plan for each situation and a communications cascade set up to share important news rapidly.

Meanwhile, engaging with a risk manager is a useful practice for schools.  Risk management input means that schools can get advice on how to nimbly react to shifting conditions and the changing needs of children, care-givers and parents.

React Effectively
When an abuse incident occurs, practical steps need to be taken, including:
• Suspending the alleged perpetrator immediately.
• Investigating the situation
• Deploying experts – and making these connections before you need them (for example our Safeguard team provide advice in real time during an incident)
• Offering support services to the victim and their family.
• Later, trying to understand what happened and why – learning lessons where possible.

Control communications
Control of external communications is vital. Schools are particularly vulnerable to trial by social media because both children and parents are part of closely connected and active online communities, which means that commentary and anger can be rapidly amplified.  Schools must honestly and carefully engage with these communities – and do so at speed after an incident becomes public. 

So, don’t sit back in silence. The last thing any organization wants is to be accused of a cover up, even months or years later, so saying nothing is not an option, unless there is a criminal investigation. At this point any organization that is the subject of a criminal investigation must be guided by the authorities on what you can share and when.

Finally, while focus must be on the victim, don’t forget that if the alleged perpetrator is another child they may need to be suspended, but also supported, pending the investigation.  If the allegation is found to be malicious, they will also need support, as will their family.

Specialist insurer Beazley’s Safeguard product provides risk management advice, incident response services and insurance for schools in this area.

Reference
1 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au)

Image by Jurie Maree