While it can be difficult to clearly identify signs of poor wellbeing in young people, recording information about their behavioural, emotional or physical wellbeing, no matter how small, is important. Doing so can help safeguarding leads and wider staff to spot trends and build a bigger picture of a pupil’s health and wellbeing over a longer period, enabling key interventions if necessary.
While not an exhaustive list, some of the things to look out for include:
- changes in appearance and hygiene
- unexplained physical injuries like bruising
- becoming angry easily
- frequent absences
Recording physical injuries observed when working with young people can be a challenge. In this article, we will offer some insights on how to describe marks and possible injuries in your safeguarding records, including use of body maps and how to create a customized body map that meets your settings’ needs.
Using Body Maps to track physical injuries and marks
Body Maps are line drawings of the front and back of a generic child or young person’s body, which may contain some enlarged features of the body including hands, feet, head etc. Body Maps can be used by safeguarding leads to describe and locate marks on a child’s body using arrows or a key.
When using Body Maps, one thing to be mindful of is that they meet the requirements of your local authorities and the age group of children you’re working with. It’s always worth contacting your local authority to see if they have a preferred template for you to use.
CPOMS software has a functionality which enables safeguarding leads to track physical signs of poor wellbeing including burns, bruising etc using Body Maps.
While CPOMS software has standard Body Maps already uploaded on the platform, it also allows users to upload their own customised Body Maps. In addition, other maps such as a school map can be uploaded and subsequently can be used in a similar way to Body Maps to record where any injuries were sustained by a young person on-site, for example in the classroom, in the sports hall etc.
When describing and recording any physical signs of poor wellbeing using the Body Map functionality, it’s important to have the voice of the child or young person at the forefront of your mind. To support this, it’s always worth writing down anything the child mentioned in relation to the disclosure and any questions you asked them.
Building a chronology
Safeguarding software like CPOMS makes it easy to group these incidents together through a chronology so you can monitor their frequency and identify any trends. For example, changes in appearance and hygiene and withdrawal from social circles may be tagged as cause for concern, whereas frequent absences could be tagged in the attendance category.
Recording and logging any concerns ensures that school staff have access to the key information about children, enabling them to provide the appropriate level of support to children and make more serious interventions if necessary.
Get in touch today
To find out more about how CPOMS could benefit your school, get in touch with a member of our team today.
