As the song goes, Christmas should be ‘the most wonderful time of the year’, but for many children sadly this isn’t the case. For many, Christmas is far from full of wonder and magical memories. For children in care, under special guardianship or who have been adopted, the build-up to and culmination of all things …
‘Child A (2000) was 12 when the risk of sexual exploitation became known. She was associating with a group of older Asian men and possibly taking drugs. She disclosed having had intercourse with 5 adults. Two of the adults received police cautions after admitting to the Police that they had intercourse with Child A. Child …
A few weeks ago I attended a very useful briefing on neglect and a new assessment tool in Bristol available to practitioners that will help them assess the risk of neglect. The session developed my knowledge of the subject and offered a practical method to understand and evaluate the harm that neglect imposes on children …
Bristol as a culturally diverse region Bristol is the tenth largest city in the UK, with a rapidly growing child population. It is often ranked as one of the happiest ,most creative, and most culturally diverse places to live. There are 91 different languages spoken from 180 countries, 45 different religions, and currently 22% of …
What do you think the number one area schools have been questioning me about lately is? You may/may not be surprised to know that it is actually around sharing of safeguarding information, particularly in relation to changes to data protection that GDPR has brought with it. My standard answer is that very little has changed …
A few weeks ago I was honoured to deliver a keynote address at the Child Protection in Education 2018 Conference held by Optimus Education in Bristol. This was the second year the conference had been held in the City, and it provided another useful opportunity for Designated Safeguarding Leads and their colleagues to get up …
What a start to the new academic year we have had! In the first 10 days, Mandy Parry Training Associates delivered 14 sessions of training, visited ten different settings, trained over six hundred participants – and fielded dozens of requests for places on our new Open Courses or our inhouse training. It’s been challenging, but …
Image taken from: Bentley, H. et al (2018) How safe are our children? The most comprehensive overview of child protection in the UK 2018. London: NSPCC. Most people are aware of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – the NSPCC – which is the largest charity in the UK specialising in …
The Advanced Safeguarding course I deliver is one of the most popular and well attended sessions I run. We discuss a range of pertinent issues that I have put together from experience as being relevant to the needs of most settings. One issue that invariably comes up in most of my safeguarding training is how …
I am now a fully nationally accredited Safer Recruitment trainer as last year I spent a couple of days in the Midlands being training by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, who are experts on understanding and combatting sexual abuse. The course was a real eye opener for me personally, even though I have been delivering …