Safeguarding should be at the heart of any organisation – and it’s not just about being able to spot abuse. It’s a commitment that nobody should be harmed by their involvement with your services. It’s a commitment to your beneficiaries that they should feel safe when they use your services. It’s something that every charity needs to ensure they have in place. The Charity Commission has issued clear guidance to Trustees. Funders are finally asking tougher questions – you can’t just have a policy anymore. Yet many charities don’t have the confidence to really grasp this crucial issue, or they still focus too narrowly on their particular service space. The statement “we don’t work with children, so how much do we have to do on this?” is still common.
A robust approach to safeguarding needs to be responsive and reactive. But crucially it needs to be proactive and preventative. It’s best to build services which are safer by design – i.e. as the world changes, as people use them, as the things we hadn’t predicted come to the fore, any safeguarding risks can be highlighted and addressed rather than waiting for them to turn into issues. Any approach will need to take into account both children and adults.
Over the years, I’ve designed and implemented many safeguarding systems. They all tend to come down to a relatively simple 5 stage approach:
- Start by thinking about the organisation’s risk profile when viewed through a safeguarding lens. It means thinking about your beneficiaries, how do they come to you, what information do they share with you, do they come from an “at risk” group? Are there inherent safeguarding risks within what you do? Do your systems and processes create risk or mitigate it? For this first stage it’s often useful to have someone independent or at least with some distance to be able to properly challenge what might be assumptions, or biased by levels of experience and/or expertise. The risk profile you create at this stage gives you the first document you’ll be able to return to as part of a monitoring and review process
2. Following on from the risk profile, you’ll create a set of ways to address those risks. This is often role clarification, having a safer approach to recruitment. It will be the training you give, the policies and procedures, the links to local safeguarding services and organisations. It’s important to think how any identified actions and activities relate to your organisational culture, structure, capabilities and style. Many safeguarding systems “fail” because they don’t match the organisation they’re implemented in – the danger of an off-the-shelf approach. You’ll have discussions about what it means to be the safeguarding lead, how you can protect time for the role. You may have conversations about how far do you need to go – is there a minimum “compliance” threshold (the wrong question really). You will almost certainly debate what’s a proportionate approach.
3. Then you’ll need to fold all of this into an implementation plan – otherwise the risk is a common one – the first time an organisation does this it can feel overwhelming and therefore doesn’t get done. A plan can help you prioritise what needs to get done, how complex it might be (there are lots of excellent resources you can draw in at this stage) and by when. And it gives everyone a clear map of where you’re going.
4. One of the most crucial yet more difficult to define parts of safeguarding is the way in which you respond to incidents, review them and then disseminate learning. A safe culture is critical to effective safeguarding. So you’ll need to rehearse what you’ll do if there’s an incident – no-one should feel worried about raising a concern – they should be encouraged and supported to do so. How you then review and learn become central to perpetuating a safer by design culture.
5. Safeguarding is not a one-off activity. Things change. Sometimes people become too accustomed to a particular risk. So it requires management, leadership and governance. These three elements working together keep it a live and dynamic process. How you do this, how you train and support people to deliver these three roles, is critical. Some organisations commission regular independent audits. But between times, regular reporting is critical. You’ll need to make sure that the data and information is always in context – generally both quantitive as well as qualitative. To give just one example – you will almost certainly see an increase in concerns following the introduction of a refreshed approach and training. So you’ll need to be clear what a subsequent fall may might mean, what it might be telling you.
Most people find that going through this process actually helps them to think afresh about everything they do, not just safeguarding. How long it takes, in what depth you probe, and the complexity of the response is proportionate to the type of organisation and your risk profile. This approach works with a small, single site charity or with a large national federated organisation. It works whether you’re supporting a local community group or delivering complex services to adults at risk.
Whatever your particular set up, please get in touch and we can see what might be the best way forward for you.