As the Head teacher at St Christopher’s school it is my responsibility, along with the Governing body, to ensure that every professional who cares for our students follow the national guidance ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ policy and practice. All staff are trained in safeguarding to a level relative to their responsibilities, and they are clear on how to report any concerns to the school's safeguarding team.

As the Designated Safeguarding Lead, my Deputy Safeguarding officer and myself support all our staff and our safeguarding team with their roles and responsibilities. We ensure that policies and procedures are up to date and in place to deal with safeguarding issues. We have strict selection and recruitment processes for all our staff and regular volunteers for example rigorous reference checks, DBS clearance, purposeful interview process that has at least one member of the interview panel who has safer recruitment training.

It is our duty to ensure that all students feel safe and are able to share any worries or concerns they may have and make sure that they feel listened to and know that we take what they say seriously. In addition our curriculum model is designed to ensure that students are supported to make safe choices and are taught how to keep themselves safe including online safety. Students are supported to know who they can talk to if they have any worries or concerns. This message is relayed and re-visited through curriculum activities, assembly content, and visual supports around the school.

A large proportion of our students are unable to communicate through formal methods therefore staff are trained to monitor children's non-verbal communication and presentation.

As a school we track and monitor any internal safeguarding referrals through our secure BehaviourWatch website which ensures the child protection team are kept informed of any concerns staff may have. This is analysed regularly to identify any possible trends and patterns.

Our safeguarding team all have the relevant LSCB safeguarding training and work closely with parents/carers social care and other professionals to ensure that we have an open and transparent process to ensure that our students are not at harm, in line with the ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ guidance.

Our Designated Looked After Teacher and the school’s wellbeing team support our Looked After students in conjunction with the virtual school with regular EPEP and LAC meetings to track, monitor and support each LAC students academic and personal development and wellbeing.

All staff working in school keep up to date with safeguarding training including online training through the LSCB website in line with our schools five year safeguarding plan.

Our building is a secure building with door swipes where needed and a secure external perimeter. Key entrance points also have camera system that allows us to monitor who enters and leaves. This is compliant with GDPR regulations and the information is only stored for a short period of time.

Our attendance policy supports our safeguarding policy and practice and any student who has a first day absence without information is phoned before 10.10am every morning. The safeguarding team would then respond accordingly if there is no contact from home. This is in accordance with the commendations in the Children Missing in Education guidance.

Please find our safeguarding policy here.