Creating safer cultures through safeguarding

Ann Craft Trust’s Safeguarding Adults Week takes place 15 - 21 November 2021 and is an invitation for us to raise awareness, highlight key safeguarding issues, facilitate conversations and to share best practice. The theme is around ‘creating safer cultures’, which explores how organisations and individuals can take steps to prevent harm happening in the first place. In my role as Support and Development Officer, I support charities and community organisations in identifying and implementing preventative measures that can help us create a safer culture in our communities.

 

The basics of safeguarding

Connected Voice is a quarter of the Safer Culture NE partnership alongside VONNE, Catalyst, Durham Community Action and Northumberland CVA. Funded by the National Lottery Community Fund and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and led by NCVO to develop safeguarding resources for the VCSE sector. I deliver the free Introduction to Safeguarding: Basic Awareness training, as well as, tailoring bespoke safeguarding training for VCSE organisations.

What I love about delivering the training is the opportunity to share safeguarding best practice and resources. Every attendee, whether they have past training experience or not, will always have a safeguarding story to tell. The sessions become a safe space for participants to ask questions, learn about roles and responsibilities, pick apart and analyse scenarios and share their concerns about safeguarding. What always impresses me, is how seriously all organisations take safeguarding, often leading to rich and meaningful discussion. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility and we look at ways we can integrate safeguarding part of our day-to-day activities. This comes in forms as small as creating a space for your team to reflect or as big as launching a campaign.

There’s a mantra to safeguarding: it should be done with people, and not to them. Making safeguarding personal is at the core of the Care Act 2014 which sets out six principles. I find these are crucial to ‘better’ and more personal safeguarding practices. The six principles are empowerment, prevention, proportionality, protection, partnership and accountability. When approaching safeguarding, the questions to ask are: How can we implement each of these principles? How can we create a safer culture? How can we look out for each other?

You can see upcoming dates for Introduction to Safeguarding on our training and events page or if you’d like to enquire about a tailored session for your organisation email Sally.Adams@connectedvoice.org.uk.

 

Putting policies into practice

When thinking about creating safer cultures in organisations, we need to build on what we have learned and ensure we have the correct policies and procedures in place. If a safeguarding concern should arise, how is it recognised, responded to and reported in an effective way? Having an effective safeguarding policy and procedure in place is vital in every organisation, no matter the size. That’s why funders will always ask to see it. As laws change, funders’ priorities alter and your organisation grows, your policies and procedures need to be reviewed to reflect this. It is important your organisation has policies in place that are relevant to your activities. Using a template or another organisation’s policy may put you and your service users at risk and can negatively impact funding success.

Connected Voice provides a free service for reviewing safeguarding policies, which can be the beginning of your organisation’s journey to creating a safer culture. From here we can support you to write a new policy, if required, and work with your staff and trustees (or management committee) to ensure the new policy is understood and proactively used.

Reviewing organisation’s policies reveals areas where they need to improve. I enjoy the process of identifying any gaps in their policies, providing suggestions on where they can improve to make them more robust and in line with the organisation’s activities and services, and supporting them until they have a more comprehensive policy that they are happy with.

 

"Well, if I said Sara had been fantastic it would be an understatement.

Honestly. A flawless process and outcomes were brilliant. I would recommend the service to anyone who asked!"

Dawn Redhead, CEO, Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company