School safeguarding reporting systems are crucial in ensuring the safety and protection of pupils from all forms of harm, abuse or neglect. These reporting systems provide a formalised process for reporting concerns, suspicions or disclosures of harm or abuse, and in the last few years, there has been an increase in schools signing up to online recording systems.
The two main systems that schools use are My Concern and CPOMS. They are fantastic systems that allow you to centrally record all concerns raised by staff and any steps taken to safeguard a pupil. They provide an easy system to produce chronologies and track how many open cases you are currently dealing with. You can access the systems from various places, which means it is always at your fingertips. A friend of mine, a headteacher in a primary school, found that having the system saved considerable staff time.
However, my main worry about these systems is that some schools only use them as a glorified filing cabinet. In education, we are great at having data to hand, but we have to actually use it.
Here are some important points to consider:
- How often do you run reports and analyse the data contained in your safeguarding system?
- Do you look at where incidents are occurring in your school?
- Are there any trends or patterns?
- Are there increased bullying incidents with certain year groups at a certain time of year?
- Are there topics you need to move to another time of year in your Sex and Relationships Education (SRE/RSE) curriculum?
- Which staff members are reporting/don’t report?
- Are there any staff members that teach the same children as the staff who have reported concerns?
- If yes, why have the other staff members not reported?
- Did they not spot the changes or signs?
- Do they know how to report?
It’s worth having these conversations with staff members while praising those who report their concerns.
When looking at your data, you should question whether there are messages to share from the content and to whom: pupils, staff or parents? Once you’ve identified the message and the target audience, the next question is how you will deliver that message. You can use a variety of ways: assemblies, staff training, newsletters, external speakers, project work, community work, and so on.
Carrying out a data trawl and running reports depends on the size of your school and the number of concerns being referred to the system. The minimum I recommend would be to conduct this once a year as part of the report to governors and trustees. However, if you are a larger school, then termly or half termly is ideal, as you don’t want to wait a whole year to uncover a problem.
This analysis should be combined with other exercises, such as mapping the school and community around the school, to see where pupils do and don’t feel safe. Ensure you show professional curiosity by unpicking the answers you receive to determine what exactly is causing the safe/unsafe feeling – never just assume!
I recently attended a school where they were recording bullying and respect incidents. Respect incidents are one-off incidents where bullying is repeated over time and with the intention to hurt an individual or group. This recording gave the school a clear oversight of incidents within it. There were incidents that might have been missed if not recorded as respect incidents. One example is that different staff members had dealt with one child physically hurting three other children but only on one occasion. This would not have been picked up as a bullying issue, but is, however, a safeguarding concern.
By using a centralised reporting system, you can help ensure the safety of pupils by identifying safeguarding concerns, allowing teachers and school staff to spot patterns and assess the level of risk to pupils. This information can help them take proactive measures to protect pupils from harm and abuse.