Safeguarding

Safeguarding is the most important aspect of school life. It sits behind and runs through everything that we do.

Our current safeguarding policy is on our policies page:

School Policies

Every year we remind parents about key safeguarding issues. This is a summary of the messages we give to parents:

“Safeguarding” is the phrase we use to describe all the different ways we keep your children emotionally and physically safe. Nothing is more important to us. This includes things like risk assessing our trips, doing fire drills, making our entrance more secure, training first aiders, talking to children about how to keep themselves safe online, about what to do if they feel someone is being unkind or is bullying them or someone else.

It also means that we have a legal duty regarding child protection to seek advice or report any concerns we have over children being neglected or hurt. This sometimes means talking to other agencies. When we do this our intention is always to protect your child. The advice we get – and we’ve recently all had child protection training – is to ‘think the unthinkable’ and that it is better to be safe than sorry. Usually we will bring concerns to you directly but there are times when we can’t do that and that can sometimes lead to families feeling upset. This is understandable but I hope parents will understand that we are always doing what we think is best for the child.

We also give regular reminders and advice regarding e-safety to parents:

E-safety continues to be a growing issue and we are going to be raising the profile of this even more this year, e.g. working on ways to support families in children having less access to smartphones.

We also do lots of work each year on how to prevent bullying and on what to do should this occur.

We regularly discuss safety with children. We tell them it is the most important responsibility we have and that this means that they should be both physically and emotionally safe at Ashmead. Protecting children from bullying is very important (see the Behaviour section of the website) but we also regularly discuss other aspects of safety, e.g. use of playground equipment, allergy awareness, confidence in speaking up if something happens that they are uncomfortable with, road safety, e-safety, etc. We use assembly times, school council sessions and weekly Books Bingo sessions as well as countless individual and group conversations to check in with children and drive these important messages home.

Safeguarding is a regular item in our staff briefings and meetings because we know that constant vigilance and re-visiting of key systems as well as regular opportunities to raise concerns are key to children being safe at school.

Staff are regularly trained in safeguarding, e.g. an annual refresher for all staff followed by other training through the year.