Useful bits and interesting bobs, No. 13
Yes, I've come back a week early, because those inset days are nearly upon us, and so there's a chance that this training resource could come in handy for some of you...
In my experience as a DSL, you think about safeguarding training on two levels. There’s your own constant quest to make sure that you know what you need to know, so that you can do your job as a DSL well. And then there’s the somehow more complicated task of working out what you want all of the other staff within your organisation to know, and how you’re going to make sure that they all know it.
For me, 99% of the time, if staff don’t know something or aren’t sure, then as long as they’ve had the wherewithal to clock the thing, they can always ask a DSL about it later when they get the chance. But there are two big exceptions to this rule:
How to handle a disclosure. If a kid decides to talk, then the staff member will only get one first go at this, so they need to know roughly what to do if it happens, and a few Do’s and Don’ts if it does. So you want to cover this well in your inductions.
What they need to share immediately, and what they can check or record later. This is probably the decision that your staff will most often have to make without your support or guidance (likely when they’re stood on the playground or in the middle of a maths lesson). Basically, ‘Do I need to tell someone about this now, or can I stick it on CPOMS later?’
In my experience, failing to tell a DSL about something that needed to be shared immediately is one of the most common mistakes made by non-specialist staff, and perhaps the one most likely to have significant implications. It’s a mistake that teachers and TA’s usually make without realising it, but when it leads to them telling you about something important too late - hours or days after it first happened - it can have serious consequences for real children. And as a kicker, it can also leave you having to have highly embarrassing conversations with external professionals.
With that in mind, perhaps the main bit of safeguarding knowledge I want all of our staff to be able to recall off the tops of their heads are our ‘Immediate Referral Indicators’. These are the things that we say they must always tell a DSL immediately.
Perhaps this stuff might not seem so important in all settings. And it’s likely that the specific set of issues you’d want people to be super aware of will differ from place to place. But here’s the list we use in our school (a small mainstream primary school, where the safeguarding traffic could politely be described as ‘busy’). It’s all on one side of A4, so it’s an easy handout to share.
As ever, I can only upload pdf files here, but if you want an alterable version of this document then do get in touch and I’ll happily send you one.
Stating the obvious, but the old adage of ‘If in doubt, then make sure you tell someone’ applies here. But I still think it’s really important to go over these Immediate Referral Indicators on a regular basis, because people are busy and it’s all too easy for things to slip through the net.
And that’s it basically. As we all get back into the swing of things at the start of the Autumn term, this is the first of three consecutive pieces where I’ll share resources that are particularly useful for DSL’s at this time of year. Next week I’ll share a quick document for checking that you’ve got all of your safeguarding bases covered within your organisation, and then the week after that we’ll take a good look at how you can make sure that all of your staff have absorbed what they need to from KCSIE Part One, as well as a more detailed look at that same document for DSL’s. So if you haven’t already, then subscribe below, to make sure you get all of that stuff for free, delivered by email straight to your inbox.
Oh, and hope you’re all well and you’re having a great summer! It’s goodish to be back…