The Chesil Education Partnership

The challenge

The Chesil Education Partnership is a partnership of 21 schools and a Further Education College in Weymouth and Portland.

The Partnership comprises fourteen primary and three secondary schools; one 13–19 school; two special schools, a pupil referral unit and Weymouth College. The Partnership was formed in 2004 with a vision to create a positive and genuine culture of cooperation amongst the educational establishments to ensure the highest educational outcomes for all children and young people in the area.

The partnership works together to enhance learning opportunities, develop staff, raise standards and, through the establishment of innovative and cost-effective provision, enhance achievement.

One of the key challenges facing the Partnership was ensuring effective safeguarding across all of the schools in the Borough of Weymouth and Portland, not least achieving a smooth transition of pupils between establishments and working with other organisations supporting pupils and families.

The solution - Tes MyConcern

In early 2015 we introduced MyConcern across every establishment within the Partnership to bring continuity and to support the robust reporting and management of safeguarding concerns.

This standardisation ensures a higher level of consistency across our schools and for multi-agency initiatives, improving communication between staff within schools and between organisations, thus improving safeguarding outcomes for the children and young people involved.

The electronic transfer of safeguarding records between establishments has made us more effective in ensuring continuity of support and we now have a much more efficient records transfer process.

Implementing Tes MyConcern

Links between MyConcern and the management information systems of each school were created prior to implementation, ensuring that the roll out went very smoothly.

The training that our Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs) received from the highly experienced MyConcern trainers was particularly effective in achieving a smooth changeover from previous paper-based recording systems. In addition to the DSL training all staff were provided with a briefing on the introduction of the system and how to record a concern.

Desktop links were provided to all staff enabling them to access MyConcern quickly and easily to report their concerns. The immediate notifications that DSLs receive as soon as a concern is reported or updated concerns has greatly enhanced their ability to respond to concerns, while at the same time delivering a very significant reduction in unnecessary bureaucracy and the costly manual processing of paper records.

The outcomes

MyConcern provides trends and pattern data for analysis through an extensive report system in order to predict and prevent concerns from escalating or even arising in the first place, both at school and Borough levels.