safeguarding | Schools Week

Ex-children’s minister gets £550-a-day safeguarding review job

The former children’s minister and MP Edward Timpson will chair a new panel set up to examine child safeguarding practices. The child safeguarding practice review panel has been set up by the Department for Education to commission national reviews of child safeguarding cases that they believe are complex or of national importance from June 29. […]

Safeguarding, fire safety and segregation: DfE releases 27 new private school warning notices

The government has published the latest batch of warning notices issued to underperforming private schools. Among other transgressions, it found two schools where boys and girls were treated differently enough to affect their personal development, as well as failure to comply with fire safety regulations, and a room used by a special school to calm […]

Ofsted hopes to move away from safeguarding ‘compliance’ checks

Ofsted wants its safeguarding procedures to have “impact”, rather than merely checking that schools are “compliant”, an inspector has said. Lee Northern (pictured), a specialist advisor on inspection policy, hopes his employer will do away with its “compliance-checking function” and move to “an impact-checking function” in future. Safeguarding, he told SSAT delegates, is like marking, […]

DfE swerves new Scottish safeguarding policy

The government has “no plans” to replicate a Scottish safeguarding scheme that nominates someone to support every school-age child, despite concerns that English schools need to do better on safeguarding. The “named person” scheme, coming into force north of the border next year, allocates an individual such as a health visitor or teacher to provide […]

Amanda Spielman is right: our schools are too risk averse

Risk-aversion in schools has gone too far, argues Andy Phippen. We need to empower our pupils to manage and mitigate risks themselves. In last week’s Sunday Times, Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, called for a change in the risk-averse culture in our schools, claiming they have become places where children are so wrapped in cotton […]

Termly safeguarding audits would help heads ‘sleep at night’

A specialist body of safeguarding officers should be set up within or separately from Ofsted because inspections are “too short” to cover the issue properly, a multi-academy (MAT) trust executive has said. Stephen Tierney, chief executive of the Blessed Edward Bamber Catholic MAT in Blackpool, said that safeguarding pupils was “too important” to be assessed as […]

Prison threat for teachers failing to report abuse means cash for training is needed

The government has been told to stump up more cash to train school staff if ministers go ahead with new proposals that could see teachers, catering staff and secretaries sent to prison for failing to report child abuse. The government launched a consultation yesterday on plans to make the reporting of child abuse mandatory for […]