Hi all,
Hope you are well and had a great summer. I have, as usual, started the academic year by delivering a whirlwind of face-to-face training in my local area, and online training across the UK, helping different organisations to mark their commitment to safeguarding children. Most of the settings commissioning my training have specifically requested information on how Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) was updated on 2 September 2024.
KCSIE is the key statutory guidance for registered education settings, predominantly schools. It’s also important guidance for registered early years settings, childminders and other professionals who work in registered settings. Furthermore, as a document it really serves as a gold standard for any organisation that works with children, even if they are part of the voluntary, charitable or private sector. As well as giving essential information on the safeguarding responsibilities of all frontline workers, designated safeguarding leaders (DSLs) and safeguarding managers, it contains crucial guidance on safer recruitment and on the management of child on child abuse, a key safeguarding concern.
All staff working with children directly must read the summary information Part 1 – and Annexe B (which gives supporting information on a range of different safeguarding concerns), while admin staff may read only Annexe A. Settings frequently have procedures in place that monitor that staff have indeed read the updated version of KCSIE and some even record this information on the single central record. I think this a good idea, although it isn’t a statutory requirement.
Every year, and sometimes several times a year, KCSIE is updated. What then are the important updates that you need to know about this year?
1. Definition of safeguarding
The definition of safeguarding has changed in the guidance to correspond to the new definition of safeguarding that first appeared in new version of the larger document of statutory guidance ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ republished in December 2023. The new definition is much longer and comprises every aspect of safeguarding, including prevention, child protection, and now Early Help. It also situates the site of risk, stating clearly that children are not only harmed within their homes, but also online and outside the home (a reference to the emerging field of contextual safeguarding, which recognises the harms that children encounter in the community and online as they become older and become more independent). It’s time to embed the new definition of safeguarding in your policy:
‘3. Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is defined for the purposes of this guidance as:
• providing help and support to meet the needs of children as soon as problems emerge
• protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online
• 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’ (KCSIE 24, page 7)
2. Importance of Early Help
Last year the government published its a root and branch review of social care, entitled ‘Children’s Social Care: Stable Homes Built on Love’ 2023. The review found that safeguarding services were mainly structured to address situations of high risk and high need at a point where service delivery was both expensive and extremely challenging. One of the review’s key recommendations was that Early Help and Child in Need services should be strengthened and integrated to provide more ‘meaningful support’ to families at the point of need, usually well before concerns reached statutory thresholds. The list of scenarios where children may need Early Help is now much longer and includes:
- children missing education, home or care,
- those experiencing multiple suspension or at risk of permanent exclusion,
- a parent in custody or affected by parental offending
3. Children need protection from exploitation (as well as abuse and neglect)
Some of the biggest mistakes made in child protection over recent years have been in the failure for professionals to recognise the vulnerability of older children. Children have been subjected to sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation, trafficking, modern slavery and radicalisation, all forms of abuse that involve grooming, an imbalance of power, and a transactional quality to relationships which ultimately serves the adults in control. Children hurt by these forms of abuse can sometimes present as consenting and possibly resent the action of those adults who seek to protect them. This area of safeguarding can therefore be very challenging, but we do know that children who are exploited are at grave risk, and particularly those who are criminally exploited are overrepresented as children recorded as losing their lives because of abuse. Stating that children need protection from exploitation as well as abuse and neglect highlights the importance of rising to this challenge of protecting children who are exploited.
4. ‘Deliberately missing education’ changed to ‘unexplainable and/or persistent absences from education’
The language we use when talking about children who are at risk is extremely important. Sometimes we unknowingly use terms that mislead, diminish the harm or even blame the children whose welfare we wish to protect. A good example of this is describing children as deliberately missing education, which points the finger at the child missing, rather than focussing on the reason they might be missing, which could be because they are being abused. Language in safeguarding is constantly changing. I recently updated all my slides which referred to the law regarding ‘smacking’ to ‘physical punishment’. The thinking is that using the term ‘smacking’ diminishes its impact on children. I do recommend the NSPCC site ‘Why Language Matters’ on the language of safeguarding which covers these terms and others that I think all professionals should be aware of: News | NSPCC Learning
5.DfE’s Data Protection in Schools guidance
Serious case reviews and child safeguarding practice reviews consistently report that a failure in child safeguarding is effective sharing of information across different agencies. Indeed, this is an issue I come up against constantly in my role as a safeguarding consultant. Worried about data protection, professionals sometimes err on the side of not sharing, sometimes to the detriment of child welfare. All the guidance on information sharing states unequivocally that sharing information to safeguard children is crucial, and GDPR should offer no barrier to that. This new guidance seeks to underline this principal and encourage both effective information sharing and data protection for schools.
6. DSL Record keeping
The guidance now describes in more detail that DSLs should keep records of all relevant concerns, discussions and decisions and the rationale for the decisions made (including not referring). In my experience, this is something that most DSLs already do, so this clarification in wording will not significantly change their practice. It’s worth remembering, however, that most negative Ofsted judgements on school safeguarding involve aspects of recording, so it’s a useful reminder to ensuring that your record keeping is as effective as it possibly can be. The biggest mistakes are mislaying records kept in hard copy, or maintaining records that are not written by the person who had the concern. You must have a process in place where every member of staff or volunteers can make a safeguarding report directly.
7. Use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create and share nudes and semi-nude images
Finally, online safeguarding risks now include the use of AI to produce and share images that exploit and harm children. Time to update your online safety policy with this risk as well as others that have come to light in recent years, including sextortion (which involves blackmailing older boys lured into sharing images by an online abuser disguised as an interested girl), self-generated child abuse images, and the ever-increasing list of ‘ishings’: phishing, mishing, quishing and vishing. (Note: phishing is a malicious email that encourages you to click a link which could install trojan software to access your computer, smishing is a malicious text message that will have a link to click on your smartphone, vishing is a voice message or an actual caller aiming to find out your personal information, and quishing is a QR code that will take you to a malicious or fake site.)
I hope you found this newsletter useful. Remember I can offer inhouse training direct to organisations, ensuring that the date, venue and content caters exactly to their needs. Do contact me if you want to find out more.
In addition, I am continuing to offer scheduled open courses throughout the year. These are all coordinated by my partner organisation Delegated Services (DS). DS also offer a diverse range of other related training). Find out more about the range of services they offer here:
Delegated Services | Home – Delegated Services
I also offer a range of consultancy safeguarding services to settings, including supportive safeguarding audits, policy writing, a safeguarding subscription service, and non-managerial safeguarding supervision. For information on all the courses and services I can offer, please visit my website www.mandyparrytraining.co.uk