Useful bits and interesting bobs, No. 10
Last week I explained why I think we should pay more attention to our safeguarding chronologies. So this week I'm offering you a tool which you can use to review and improve the ones in your school.
My last piece (read it here) finished with two main questions: How good are the safeguarding chronologies in your school? And how could they be improved?
Well, to help you answer those two questions, I can now proudly present to you my Safeguarding Chronology Appraisal thingy, which you can download below (as ever, get in touch if you want a Word version of this document that you can edit).
This appraisal form is designed to be simple and easy to fill in. Just pick a chronology – or a section of one – read through it and then answer the evaluation questions on the form. You should be able to do the whole thing pretty quickly and barring the last two questions, you do it all just from reading the chronology.
Personally, I think it will be of most value if you do it just for you and your school (rather than as part of an external process). Do it because you think it will be useful, not because you think you should or because you want to demonstrate that you’ve done it or show that you’re good at safeguarding. But there are no rules, so you can use it however you see fit.
Stating the obvious, but pick a chronology - or a section of one - that is reasonably long without being too arduous. And if you carry out an appraisal for two or three different cases then you’ll get a much more complete picture than you will get from just one. And despite what I said in the last paragraph, if you can get someone external to do it with you that you trust and respect then great. If not, then at least try and have two internal people on it. I don’t think doing it on your own would be a waste of time, but you’ll be getting a limited perspective, especially if half of the chronology is likely to be made up of things you’ve written yourself. And then if you can get two or more of you to do it, I’d suggest you do it independently from each other, and then compare your results, rather than working together. That way you’re more likely to get a fair and honest reflection of what each person thinks, and avoid the cursed groupthink.
Finally, try and remember that the form is not for reviewing the case itself (although that will naturally happen a bit, and if it makes you realise that you need to be making a referral to the MASH then you can put that down as a useful if unintended consequence). But the idea is to review how effective your safeguarding is in general, and more specifically how good your chronologies are.
There is a good chance that this is largely a back patting exercise, in which you realise that you are doing a lot of things really well (and if that’s the case then great, because there is always value in recognising positives in our own practise). But you might also generate a list of things to think about, talk about or do something about, and if that’s the case then hopefully it will feel like it’s been beneficial, rather than annoying!
As ever, please do get in touch if you’ve got something that you could recommend to other DSL’s, whatever it is, as long as it’s potentially useful interesting…