Safeguarding

Shaftesbury Park Primary School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all its pupils.

What is safeguarding?

Safeguarding is defined as protecting children from maltreatment; preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development; ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care; and taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.

Some common themes in Safeguarding include the following: neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, children missing from education, child sexual exploitation (CSE), bullying including cyberbullying, domestic violence, drugs, fabricated or induced illness, faith abuse, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, gangs and youth violence, mental health, preventing radicalisation, sexting and trafficking.  

Safeguarding encompasses more than just recognising and identifying children at risk from harm and taking action to prevent this. It also includes the following elements:

• Safer Recruitment – ensuring that everyone working in our school is suitably qualified and has undergone appropriate checks;
• Safer Premises – ensuring our school site is secure and safe and that children can be collected and dropped off at school safely;
• Online Safety – ensuring that children and parents know how to keep children safe online
• Risk Assessments – ensuring that school trips (including residential trips) and other activities are properly risk assessed in order to minimise risk and keep children safe;
• The curriculum – ensuring that we have a broad and balanced curriculum with activities that are fun and engaging, but safe;
• Working in partnership – working with other agencies to share information; and
• Monitoring attendance – ensuring that children have good education, all absences from school are accounted for and ensuring no children are missing from education.

Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is everyone’s responsibility

Here at Shaftesbury Park, we recognise that everyone who comes into contact with children and their families and carers has a role to play in safeguarding children.

All staff receive annual Child Protection and Safeguarding update training and are aware of the procedures for passing on concerns within school.

All parents should feel able to come and talk to any of our team, and/or the safeguarding leads named below:

Dealing with Concerns

If we have a concern about a pupil or receive information that leads us to be concerned that a pupil has been harmed or is at risk of harm or their welfare is being compromised, we have a duty to take action to protect the pupil concerned.

The concern may be as a result of a disclosure from a pupil, a parent or a third-party or may arise due to behaviour that has caused us to become concerned. In all instances concerns are passed on to the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL).

The DSL may need to share information and work in partnership with other agencies where there are concerns about a child’s welfare. We will ensure that our concerns about our pupils are discussed with his/her parents/carers first unless we have reason to believe that such a move would be contrary to the child’s welfare.

Safeguarding Policies

We have a number of policies and procedures in place that contribute to our safeguarding commitment, including our Child Protection, Designated Teacher and E-Safety Policies. These are regularly updated in line with relevant guidance and government documentation. All of our policies can be found on our School Policies page.

We also adhere to the following three DfE safeguarding documents which may also be found there:

• Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023
• Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023
• The Prevent Duty 2023