All children, and especially those facing the most disadvantage, can benefit in terms of social, emotional and educational outcomes from attending high quality early learning and childcare. Personal, social, and emotional development (PSED) is vital for healthy living, happiness, and cognitive growth. Therefore, robust safeguarding policies are essential for nurseries and early years settings.
What does safeguarding look like in early years?
For children who have little or no language to communicate their needs either because of their age or the developmental stage, it can be a challenge to identify their safeguarding needs. It starts with ensuring children are at the center of safeguarding practice in these settings and paying close attention to what children are telling you both verbally and non-verbally.
Some key signs to look for include:
- Significant changes in children’s behaviour.
- A decline in children’s general wellbeing.
- Unexplained bruising, marks or signs of possible abuse or neglect.
- Concerning comments from children.
Spotting the signs and symptoms of harm and knowing how to report and record them in a timely manner is critical. On a recent webinar, Gail Murphy, Early Years Development Manager at NDNA (National Day Nurseries Association) stated, “It doesn’t matter how small it is, it’s that feeling in the pit of your stomach when something just doesn’t feel right.”
She went on to explain that when you have a chronology of little bits of things that are building up that don’t seem to quite meet that harm threshold or when you can’t quite make that referral to Local Authority Designated Officer, it is then that you start to see the bigger picture. When safeguarding cases arise, partnerships are needed to work within and between teams, as well as including parents, the health visiting team, social workers, the LADO, or others to support the child.
The designated safeguarding lead (DSL) is responsible for raising awareness of safeguarding practices with staff including training and skill development, as well as managing all the information related to safeguarding and child protection. Their responsibilities include managing referrals, liaising with other professionals, whether that’s the LADO, independent referral officers, or social workers. As Gail discussed, this could range from forms from accidents outside the setting, recording absences, first aid accidents and incidents, low level concerns, comments by parents, observations by the key person right through to serious allocations and disclosures. All those records should be in the same place so the DSL can easily access and review patterns and concerns over time as well as create reports for child protection meetings.
Just as important as it is to report concerns about children, it is also important to report concerns about those working with children. Safer recruitment practices include pre-employment checks, such as DBS checks, but sometimes unsafe individuals still get into the profession and become part of the workforce. Having a whistleblowing procedure is necessary to ensure a confidential way to report concerns regarding a colleague, whether it’s another practitioner or manager. Ultimately, the responsibility of early years settings is to make sure that the children are kept safe, so safeguarding concerns about an adult need to be reported and recorded so they can’t abuse or otherwise harm the children in their care.
Statutory guidance
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework is mandatory for all group and school-based early years providers in England. Similar guidance is in force for other nations such as Early learning and childcare: statutory guidance in Scotland and the National Minimum Standards for Regulated Childcare in Wales.
Some key requirements include:
- Having a practitioner designated to take lead responsibility for safeguarding.
- All practitioners to be alert to any issues of concern in the child’s life at home or elsewhere.
- Ensuring that people looking after children are suitable, having passed the relevant qualifications, training and required checks to fulfil their roles.
- Providers to hold training to enable staff to identify signs of possible abuse and neglect at the earliest opportunity, and to be able to respond in a timely and appropriate way.
- Having a way to securely maintain and access safeguarding records and be able to quickly obtain and share relevant information with parents and carers, other professionals working with the child, the police, social services and inspectorates as appropriate.
The role of technology
Having software where all safeguarding information is stored securely in one place with access according to level of responsibility ensures those that need to access the information can do so quickly.
With CPOMS StudentSafe, documents can be stored and accessed through the application, links between events which have been recorded by different staff can be made easily and reports for child protection meetings can be created instantly. And when a child transfers to or from other settings, the software is able to create reports to send securely to the primary school or to other childcare settings.
StudentSafe adapts to fit the specific requirements of any nursery or early years setting. With customisable features, staff can standardise reporting and recording processes across multiple nurseries, making group-level management more efficient and consistent.
When managing staff records, moving from paper-based records to online records with a platform like CPOMS StaffSafe is a huge time saver. The system provides a way for nurseries to keep track of low-level concerns for the adults in their setting, creating a chronology of concerns to identify if additional action is needed.
For more information on how CPOMS safeguarding solutions can help put your safeguarding and child protection policies into action, get in touch with our team. Also ask about our exclusive discount for NDNA members.
