Child Protection Training is Essential for Every Adult at your School

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The whole school community is wide and diverse, but everyone in an education establishment has a responsibility to provide a safe environment for children and young people by:

• preventing unsuitable people from working there
• promoting safe practice and challenging unsafe practice
• identifying children suffering or likely to suffer significant harm and acting appropriately, by identifying grounds for concern and acting appropriately, and contributing to effective working in partnership with other agencies and organisations*.

Training is a key element in achieving a ‘safe environment’, but exactly who should be trained? The guidance document ‘Safeguarding Children and Safer Recruitment in Education’ (HM Government 2006) states that the following groups should receive training:

• New staff should have child protection training as part of their induction into your school
• All staff (except those with designated responsibility for child protection) should have training at least every 3 years
• Staff with designated child protection responsibility should have training every 2 years and receive multi-agency training.
• Temporary staff such as supply teachers and volunteers should receive child protection briefings.

Another multi-agency document called ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ (HM Government 2006) complements the guidance by outlining separate groups of people. In an education context these are:

1. Staff who ‘work regularly’ with children For example, in an education context this would include teaching staff and classroom assistants who work regularly and predominately with children

1. Staff who have ‘regular contact with children’ This would include people such as dinner ladies and kitchen staff, caretakers, librarians, parent volunteers, office and other administrative staff, technicians, cleaners and even bus drivers who transport children to and from school

Training should be appropriate to the level of contact and responsibility inherent in the role. Therefore a teacher who is also a designated child protection lead should have more in-depth training than a teacher who is not a designated lead. A classroom assistant should correspondingly have more in-depth training than the school office staff because of their more intensive contact with children.

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