How good are your safeguarding chronologies?
As we approach the end of the academic year, it feels like a good time to think about one of the foundations of our safeguarding systems: our chronologies.
We’re at that point in the school calendar where conscientious DSL’s up and down the country will be completing their annual safeguarding audits of various kinds. And other DSL’s will be bravely putting off those same audits by finding virtually anything else to do (arranging meetings, covering lessons etc etc), until they can get that rush of motivation that comes from an email in capital letters saying DEADLINE EXPIRING. In my experience not many DSL’s love these audits, even if they recognise that they are very important. I think one reason for this reluctance is that they can feel a bit removed from what we actually do as DSL’s. We have this mad and endlessly complicated job, and then we’re trying to capture all the work we do by ticking little boxes on a huge spreadsheet. It just feels a bit odd sometimes.
So with that in mind, today I’m looking at one of the things that is definitely right at the centre of how we actually experience and do our jobs on a day-to-day basis: our safeguarding chronologies. How should we think about them? How should we operate them? And how do we make sure that they really work? And if you want to check how good your school’s chronologies are, I’ll also offer you a tool so that you can audit them yourself (and I guess that’s the point where both regular readers will hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button).
Why safeguarding chronologies can go unloved
Last year I went to stay at a friend’s caravan in Whitby. This caravan had previously belonged to his Mum and Dad, but his Dad had recently passed away and his Mum has got dementia. Him and his brother want to keep the caravan on, but they also want other people to make use of it, so he had offered me to take my own family up there for a week during the summer. And in the caravan there was a little notebook that they treated like a family journal. And in the journal were entries from all of their family’s visits there, going back over ten years or more. Just little descriptions of what they’d got up to every time they’d come to stay. And it was one of the most lovely things that I’ve ever read.
Another friend of mine who’s Dad passed away recently found a similar little note book when she was clearing out his stuff. It was a hand-written record of all of his bird-watching trips over the years: where he’d been and what he’d seen. I have virtually zero interest in bird-watching, but it still felt like a piece of treasure. It felt like it should belong in a museum, if it didn’t already so obviously belong to her now.
These things were both in a way chronologies. They were also both marvels. There was something about the passing of time on the pages that made them seem almost magical – you felt honoured to hold them and you turned the pages with something approaching reverence. They were little wonders, with pages filled with love. And both of them made me want to create chronologies of my own, so sure enough we now have a holiday journal for our family. And one day I hope that my children and grandchildren will hold it with that same sense of awe, and flick through the pages with smiles on their faces.
But safeguarding chronologies aren’t like this. They’re pretty depressing. A long list of bad things and sad things that don’t bring anyone joy. No one loves safeguarding chronologies. And when I first became a DSL I think I actively disliked them. Not because they were hard to read (although they could be), but because people in the safeguarding world seemed to be obsessed with them. And I found this quite depressing. I felt like even a good chronology is a very poor way to view the life of a little human being. Here we just had some pages of things that happened, with no emotion, no feeling, no mention of the fact that Tyler loves playing in the rain, or chasing bubbles or dressing up as Spiderman. I thought they were exactly the sort of thing that people who don’t actually work with real children fixate on - that reduced a child’s life to some cold facts on some expressionless pages. So I didn’t really like chronologies.
I still don’t to be honest, for some of the same reasons, but also because they would be a very weird thing to like wouldn’t they? Who would actually want to read chronologies? And presumably, ideally, we all wish that safeguarding chronologies didn’t even exist, because they didn’t have to, because there was nothing to write in them, because everyone lived nice happy lives.
But we don’t live in that world and I have learnt to value chronologies much more than I used to.
Why our safeguarding chronologies deserve our appreciation
To be honest, one of the main reasons I value them much more now is that I have come to appreciate just how limited and fallible my memory is. When I first started as a DSL I felt like I knew every case in our school inside out, and could probably recall each meeting I’d been to, to a frightening degree of accuracy. Now, after over a decade, the names and stories blur, and I have to go back to my chronologies to check what was said in meetings I sat in three weeks ago. So I realise they are absolutely essential for DSL’s, in a world where we simply can’t store all of the important information in our heads all of the time.
But there are other reasons I’ve learned to appreciate them more. One of the more heart-warming things about them - and ok, I admit it’s a tiny silver lining at the edge of a really big grey cloud sometimes - is that they show that people care. For children whose lives are filled with danger and misery, surrounded by people who may be at best disinterested in them, and sometimes wilfully doing them harm, that alone can be quite miraculous.
I think our electronic safeguarding recording systems (which I genuinely love by the way), hide this aspect of our chronologies somewhat. But the old rag-tag safeguarding folders we had when I first started as a DSL, containing a hodge-podge collection of different forms, random printouts and sometimes just little scrawls on post-it notes, were different. Whilst they were worse in virtually every other way, when you looked through one you could easily see just how much time, effort and care had gone into them. Because amongst all of the many depressing things that you might read in our chronologies, what you can also see is that they are a record of lots of people caring. People noticing things and caring about them. And whilst it’s sad that they have to be written, it’s still a good thing that people care and are writing them. I really think that that alone counts for something. It’s something we probably take for granted, because it seems like a bare minimum, but that doesn’t change the fact that it matters.
Chronologies are also a way of understanding things. They’re still just one way, and they have limitations, but that doesn’t mean they’re not very useful. If I ever sit down and properly read a chronology of any length, whether it’s one we’ve compiled in our school or one I’ve been sent by another setting, I almost always learn something, realise something or gain a perspective I didn’t have before. They’re not a substitute for meeting a child, or talking to their teacher, or setting foot in their house. But that doesn’t stop them being extremely useful. I defy anyone to read through a chronology that covers more than a year in any detail and not come away smarter than they were before. So they are definitely useful in that sense.
They can also be useful in other ways, as in they can help us to actually get things done.
They can help us to make smarter decisions about what to do. So often, if you read a new incident or concern in isolation you would come away with one outcome, but if you read it in the context of the whole chronology your plan for next steps might be completely different. I get extremely frustrated when other professionals describe things that happened 8 months ago as ‘historic’ (try telling an adult that has been through a traumatic incident 8 months ago to get over it because it’s ‘historic’ and see what response you get!). It feels like I’m stating the obvious, but what has happened before is usually really rather important. I appreciate that it’s time consuming, but it’s worth asking ourselves how and when we read our chronologies. and whether we do it enough. Used well, they can - and should - make a difference to what we actually do next.
And if you’re trying to submit a decent referral to social care, or preparing for an ICPC - let alone if you’re ever asked to provide evidence for court hearings - chronologies suddenly become the most important thing ever. I’ve experienced cases filled with hours and hours of writing and reading concerns, to make up chronologies that go on for pages and pages and pages, that has all seemed futile and worthless, as things have dragged on for months and months, whilst nothing seems to change for that vulnerable little child. And then, almost suddenly, you get that request for a court statement, and then there that chronology is. As if it’s been waiting all along, ready to finally actually do something. And in those moments I always feel extremely grateful to all of the amazing staff that have contributed to that chronology. Because then it really matters. It really matters that you can provide a thorough and detailed record of everything your schools knows, has witnessed and has done. When it’s got to the point where legal decisions are going to be made that will change people’s lives forever, that chronology gives you the authority to say what you need to say.
One other well-known purpose of chronologies is for people to review cases where things have gone wrong and there has been a tragedy. We know that chronologies become very significant in these circumstances, and on some level we just hope that if that happens where we work, then that chronology will not make us look bad. I accept that this is part of the background that we live with when we are compiling our chronologies. I accept that this unpleasant truth is something we are all aware of, and it shapes the way we work and the things we say and the things we do and the things we write down. But I don’t like it as a state of mind, and I don’t think it does the reputation of chronologies any good. So I’m not going to say anything more about it here (although I might return to this aspect of safeguarding at a later date).
No, the reason we make chronologies should be a good one, and that is to make a difference in the lives of the children we work with. Let’s make that our starting place.
But if we’ve decided that our chronologies really matter, then the next question is ‘Are these chronologies actually any good?’ And I suspect that a lot of us don’t really know the answer to this, especially because we don’t read chronologies from other schools that often (this is especially true if you work in a primary school). To return to where I started, in my experience even audits and reviews and inspections often focus on all of the other aspects of safeguarding, but relatively speaking overlook chronologies - when for most DSL’s they are the absolute bread and butter of their day jobs.
So I’ve made the case for paying more attention to our chronologies. And this leaves us with two main questions: How good are the chronologies in your school? And how could they be improved?
Well I’ll be back next week to share with you a short, simple and easy to use appraisal form, that could help you to answer those questions…