Education Safeguarding Team

* You can view and book courses at the bottom of this page *

What do we do?

The Education Safeguarding Team helps protect and safeguard children and young people by training and supporting staff in schools, colleges and early years settings.

We provide services to all forms of educational establishments across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough so that they can fulfil their responsibilities under current legislation and government guidance on safeguarding.

Through our work with schools and settings, we raise awareness of safeguarding issues and enable staff to keep up to date with current legislation and guidance.

We are located within the Education Directorate of People and Communities and play a key role in representing educational establishments at a range of multi-agency meetings and forums in order to promote inter-agency work.

As a service we work closely with all Children’s Services across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to support all aspects of safeguarding children and young people.

Through our work we strive to promote consistent best practice and responses to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children.

Services we offer:

Training

Keeping Children Safe in Education requires schools to keep their staff regularly updated on child protection and safeguarding issues. We offer in house training to all schools, colleges and early years settings and can also provide training materials for schools and colleges to train their own staff.

We deliver the training for Designated Safeguarding Leads and Deputy Leads in all schools, colleges and early years settings, throughout Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

Each year we publish a training programme offering courses on a range of topics relevant to safeguarding. This can be requested by emailing ECPS.Coursebookings@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

Support and Guidance

We provide support and guidance on safeguarding and child protection issues.

We produce guidance on a range of topics and also procedures and model policies which can be adopted by schools, academies, educational settings and Local Authority services. These can be found on the Education Safeguarding Team group on the Knowledge Hub, which is available to Designated Safeguarding Leads and Deputy Lead of all local authority maintained schools and academies and independent schools who subscribe to our annual safeguarding subscription package.

For information about this and the Knowledge Hub, please email ECPS.General@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

Monitoring

We play an important role in monitoring the performance of schools around safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people. As the responsibility of schools increases in this area, ensuring they meet their statutory obligations is essential.

We ask schools to complete a child protection monitoring report for governors and to review their safeguarding and child protection policy annually.

Personal Safety Curriculum

P.S.! Safeguarding Children Through Personal Safety are Units of Work, which form part of the PSHE Service Personal Development Programme and focus solely on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. They provide high quality, coherent and comprehensive activities which are not only compelling and relevant to everyday life but are also age appropriate. These Units ensure that personal safety work is planned and not incidental. There are clear opportunities for recording assessment, which will help track children’s progress and personal wellbeing.

Children have a right to be taught, be able to discuss and practise personal safety skills in a safe environment where the level of trust is high between themselves, adults and peers e.g. in classrooms, assemblies etc. They need safe and creative opportunities where this can happen so that they are able to develop their knowledge, understanding and attitudes which helps them develop both emotionally and socially. These opportunities will enable children to begin to make positive choices and develop important transferable life skills which they will continue to use through to their adult life.

The suggested teaching activities are intended to empower children to enable them to lead safer lives by learning how to make safer choices; identify people who they trust and also who they can talk to if they have a worry or a 'no' or 'I'm not sure' feeling. The activities are not intended to instil fear into children, however, they should be explored in enough depth so that they take on meaningful messages. There is a focus on high risk areas, including touches and secrets.

In addition we are able to provide training on the use of Protective Behaviours which is a practical, down to earth approach to personal safety which aims to build self-esteem and an increased assertiveness relating to feeling and being safe.

Protective Behaviours aims to teach a range of safety skills and techniques which can help in a wide range of situations and has a strong emphasis on developing an internal measure of whether we feel safe or not and on developing individually based strategies and solutions.

Please email ECPS.General@cambridgeshire.gov.uk for more information about our work on either of these programmes.

If you would like to receive this year's Education Safeguarding Team Training Programme, please email tracey.carter@cambridgeshire.gov.uk.