St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School and Nursery is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. We are fully committed to ensuring that consistent effective safeguarding procedures are in place to support families, children and staff at school. We believe all staff and visitors have an important and unique role to play in child protection. For this reason, staff safeguarding training or update sessions take place at the start of every academic year.

At St Augustine’s we believe:

Schools can contribute to the prevention of abuse

All children have the right to be protected from harm

Children need to be safe and feel safe in school

Designated Safeguarding Leads at St Augustine’s

We have four trained DSLs at St Augustine’s:

Mrs E Lambe – Senior DSL

Mrs P Johnson, Miss J Ellams and Mrs A McHale 

All Staff members at St Augustine’s are trained to safeguard pupils.

We also have a Designated Safeguarding Governor – Mr Rob Hughes.  Our safeguarding governor visits the school regularly to audit our policy and procedures. All the named Safeguarding Officers have undertaken the relevant training.

All Child Protection information will be dealt with in a confidential manner.

Safeguarding policies

General information about safeguarding related policies and practices within our school can be found in our policies section on the website or by clicking on the documents at the bottom of the page.

Operation Encompass

Our school participates in a Police-led initiative called Operation Encompass, a scheme which will ensure that we can better support any child where a domestic incident has been reported to Police from their home.

Following a domestic incident, the Police will make contact with the school via telephone and communicate relevant information to nominated, fully-trained school staff. This will ensure that we are made aware early enough to support children and young people in a way that means they feel safe, supported and listen to.

Each school has a member of staff called a key adult who is trained to liaise with the police, when required, whilst ensuring support is available to the child. 

Click below to find out further information.

http://www.operationencompass.org/

Parents Protect

If you want to know more about keeping children safe from sexual abuse, there is a Home Office supported website providing information and advice called Parents Protect.

What is Parents Protect?

The website is an information and resources website which aims to raise awareness about child sexual abuse, answer questions and give adults the information, advice, support and facts, they need to help protect children.

Their aim is to help parents and carers better protect children from sexual abuse. Our most important task is to prevent sexual abuse from taking place in the first place. We believe we can do this by:

• Helping to dispel some of the common myths around child sexual abuse

• Giving parents and carers practical information that will help them keep youngsters safe from harm.

We understand that child sexual abuse is something we’d rather not think and talk about – but we believe the best way of protecting children is for adults to do just that! By not being afraid to talk about the issues, we become much better able to understand the steps we can take to keep our children as safe as possible.

Prevent

All staff at St Augustine’s regularly update their training around the government’s Prevent Strategy. This strategy aims to safeguard vulnerable people from being radicalised to supporting terrorism or becoming terrorists themselves.