The annual report of The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel was published this week looking back over “patterns of practice” and “key messages” arising from the serious safeguarding incident reviews of 2022-23.

While the target audience of this review is largely safeguarding professionals outside schools, there are important messages that school leaders can take from this review in their management of safeguarding their own pupils.

1. Schools as safe spaces

The review highlights the importance of schools as safe places for children who are at risk, and the fact that they should be included in information sharing between agencies involved with families, as summarised on page 109:

We have emphasised the critical role of schools in the safeguarding system…Schools have a pivotal role to play in protecting children of school age because they are uniquely positioned to identify concerns early and to recognise when concerns are escalating.

This was also noted in the recently redrafted Working Together To Safeguard Children, although for the moment there remains no requirement for schools to be included in multi-agency safeguarding meetings.

The report also notes that there can be a lack of information sharing between agencies and this can be a source of safeguarding failures. It therefore supports “initiatives that seek to better include schools in both multi-agency practice and safeguarding partnerships”.

This should give schools’ designated safeguarding leads the confidence to seek involvement at every stage in decisions and conversations about children for whom there are safeguarding concerns.

2. The importance of attendance

More than half of the children who died or were seriously harmed in 2022-23 were either not enrolled in school or had low attendance at the time of the incident. As page 42 of the report states:

Children who are vulnerable or at risk of harm will be at increased risk that not being in school makes them invisible to services and that they may then miss out on the supplementary safeguarding that the school environment provides.

This serves as a further alarm call to school leaders about the importance of closely monitoring school attendance, as it is a potential red flag for serious safeguarding concerns.

It also emphasises that there should be engagement with external agencies whenever a student is excluded or moved from school to home education.

3. Mental health impact

Another reinforcement of current concerns in education is the fact that one in five of the children involved in the most serious safeguarding reviews had a mental health condition.

In those reviews where the child’s mental health condition was linked to the incident, almost half of these children died, showing the importance of identifying and looking to support mental health conditions.

It is not stated in this report, but it implicitly shows how dangerous it is for schoolchildren that the threshold for referring young people for support to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services is growing ever higher, and waiting lists for treatment in many areas are growing ever longer.

4. The need for professional curiosity

Half of the serious safeguarding incidents in this report involved domestic abuse at home and page 12 emphasises the danger posed by schools, and other agencies, being often unaware of this or lacking the training to support pupils in these cases:

Limited understanding of domestic abuse among practitioners was notable in reviews, which is affecting their ability to respond in a timely and appropriate way.

The importance of what Keeping Children Safe in Education calls, “professional curiosity” for teachers, is emphasised in the report as a way to avoid “opportunities to identify and respond to domestic abuse” sometimes “being missed”.

Operation Encompass, which requires police to inform schools of incidents of domestic abuse and provide early support, is mentioned as an important factor that schools should actively embrace in their safeguarding work.

5. Avoid unconscious bias

Finally, the report emphasises how important it is for school leaders to understand the potential for unconscious bias towards some groups of students. For instance, the report notes on page 95:

Black boys disproportionately faced exclusion from school and children from Black and other minoritised ethnic backgrounds are underrepresented in receiving early help services. Given these circumstances, it is sadly not surprising to see the disproportionality of Black boys and boys from minority ethnic backgrounds still being criminally exploited.

It is vital that schools take into account these potential wider societal concerns and look to be mindful of, and actively challenge, the potential for different levels of support for students of different ethnic backgrounds.

An important read

While this is a summary of a number of the key findings of the report, it is recommended that safeguarding leads read it themselves.

The case studies of the most serious safeguarding concerns provide a sobering reminder of that frequent safeguarding mantra that all teachers should remember - “it could happen here”.

Luke Ramsden is deputy head of an independent school and chair of trustees for the Schools Consent Project

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