What is Safeguarding?

Many people think that the words Safeguarding and Child Protection mean the same thing. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘Promoting Welfare’ are relatively new terms. They were brought into practice with the Children Act 2004 and are much wider used than Child Protection. Child Protection forms just a small part of Safeguarding and Promoting Welfare.

The statutory definition of Safeguarding and Promoting Welfare is:

• Protecting children from maltreatment;
• Preventing impairment of children’s health or development;
• Ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care;
• Undertaking that role so as to enable those children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully.

Safeguarding covers a wide range of activities and actions taken by a number of different people and agencies. By ‘Safeguarding’ we mean 3 main types of activities:

• Specific action to identify and protect children;
• Activities directly designed to identify and support children who are vulnerable to poor outcomes and life chances;
• Ways to improve the general health and wellbeing of all children.

Safeguarding is about keeping children safe at all times.

Safeguarding at CGPS

All of our Governors and our Staff at Culverstone Green Primary School share the objective to help keep the children safe by contributing to:

• Providing a caring, positive, safe and stimulating environment that promotes the social, physical and moral development of every child. We are fully committed to ensuring that consistent, effective safeguarding procedures are in place to support families, children and staff at our school.
• Providing a safe environment for them to learn.
• Identifying children who are suffering or likely to suffer significant harm and taking appropriate action with the aim of making sure that they are kept safe both at home and in the education setting

To achieve this, we:

• Aim to prevent unsuitable people from working with the children.
• Promote safe practice and challenge any poor or unsafe practice.
• Identify instances where there are grounds for concern about a child’s welfare and initiate or take appropriate action to keep them safe.
• Contribute to effective partnership working between all those involved in providing services for our children.
• Ensure our staff and Governors have regular and updated safeguarding training.

Safeguarding Staff

All adults in our school have a responsibility for Safeguarding and all staff have completed Safeguarding Training, by the school's Designated Safeguarding Lead, as well as online refresher training. The most recent whole school staff training took place in September 2020. All staff Safeguarding training is recorded for school records.

If you are concerned about any Safeguarding issues, please come and speak to one of our Safeguarding Leads. 

Debbie Maxted leads Safeguarding on behalf of our Governors. Part of Debbie's role is to monitor and challenge our procedures and policies, ensuring that we are effectively safeguarding all of our pupils.

At School, we have a Single Central Record (SCR) to ensure all staff and volunteers have the required checks and certificates. Our Single Central Record is managed by the School office manager, to ensure this record is updated and ensures all of the necessary qualifications and documents are in place.

Visitors

All staff, governors, students and volunteers undertake a DBS check and details of these checks are kept in a single central record in school.

All visitors to the school are required to sign in, upon which they are given a visitors lanyard:

• Visitors with the appropriate checks and are able to work with children will be given a green lanyard.
• Visitors who are not able to work with children are given a red lanyard.

If you have concerns...

Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional) or neglect can have a damaging effect on a child’s health, educational attainment and emotional well-being. Some changes in a child’s behaviour may not necessarily indicate that a child is suffering abuse or neglect. In some cases those changes may be symptoms of a hidden disability, undiagnosed medical condition or changes in medication.

If you become concerned about:

• Comments made by a child.
• Marks or bruising on a child.
• Changes in a child’s behaviour.
• Changes in a child’s appearance.

Please report these concerns to our Safeguarding Lead or one of the Safeguarding Team.

If you are concerned about safety of an activity or any aspect within school, please also report it to our Safeguarding Lead or one of the Safeguarding Team.

If you have concerns, please do NOT decide to do nothing or leave our school without telling anyone.

Safeguarding in the Curriculum

Safeguarding and the promotion of British Values is central to our work at Culverstone Green Primary School. We plan to constantly challenge children to think deeply about safeguarding matters and their own personal physical and mental wellbeing.

Priority on identifying opportunities in the structured and unstructured curriculum for children to learn about safeguarding is core to our school.

Our curriculum and values give pupils opportunities to experience life in all its diversity, to acquire resilience, knowledge, understanding and skills that significantly impact on personal development, behaviour, welfare and safety which equip every child with the knowledge and skills required for personal safeguarding.

Our PSHE curriculum covers all areas of Safeguarding including Relationship and Health Education, anti-bullying, relationships, citizenship and health education.  We are sensitive in our teaching and recognise that some more sensitive subjects need to taught at an age appropriate level, or at a small group or 1:1 level where a more urgent need arises.

All of our policies, including our Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy, can be viewed on our policies page:

Policies | Culverstone Green Primary School (cgps.kent.sch.uk)