Safeguarding is scary. You hear horror stories about it causing Ofsted visits to end early. You hear horror stories in the media about children being badly let down. You hear horror stories about teachers being fined or sent to prison.

While safeguarding should be something that we are incredibly sensitive towards, these stories sensationalise it and create an unnecessary fear around it. It’s easy to get caught up in it all, especially amid the demands placed on schools.

But safeguarding isn’t about box-ticking - it’s about protecting students. By understanding that, and recognising its importance, we can better engage with it.

At Passmores Academy, we continually talk about safeguarding. Instead of having a couple of big safeguarding talks each year, we have them small and often, every Thursday. We’ll talk about different issues every week and discuss what we’ve noticed. Safeguarding can be hard and upsetting - I’m not denying that - but if you’re used to talking about it more often, it removes some of that fear.

It can be stressful, too, so we need to look after our teachers. We hold staff supervision meetings specifically about safeguarding and we provide counselling contacts. We understand it’s scary. We accept it’s hard.

Everyone is reminded that safeguarding is a collective effort, not one person’s individual task. Every two weeks, we have inclusion panel meetings to which we can bring any concerns. These concerns will be followed up. We are a community and we work together to protect each other; for that reason, everyone is supported, everyone discusses it.

So what are the pillars on which our safeguarding system rests? They look a little like the following themes.

Noticing differences

The biggest role for teachers is to observe the students and recognise changes. It’s not about paperwork - it’s about being the eyes and ears of the community, which allows us to ask the right questions. We can notice changes by paying attention to our young people: what’s their usual demeanour and how has this changed? Talk about the atmosphere, talk if things aren’t feeling right and look at what’s causing that.

One way we keep an eye on these changes is through mixed-age tutor groups. Instead of organising them based on year group - as most schools do - we have approximately five students from each year in every tutor group. Each young person has a learning partner from a different year and many will have the same tutor throughout their time at school.

This means the tutor can really get to know the student. Instead of having 30 new students to get to know, our tutors only have five new Year 7s every year. This makes it easier to create close relationships, to recognise those changes and to foster trust - and that is the key to good safeguarding.

For Year 7s, we don’t have the normal parents’ evenings where you spend five minutes each with 14 teachers. Instead, parents have an hour-long meeting with the student’s personal tutor, organised at the parents’ convenience. This means both parties really get to know each other and it creates an extra layer of trust. Our community extends past the school gates and, in this way, we can tighten that community.

Removing stigma

To really help, we need students to talk to us. We allow this to happen through trust and being open. We encourage everyone to be themselves. Often if you remove the stigma, you remove the barriers to having a conversation about it. We’ve had many students pass through who are transgender or who feel they can be open about their sexuality, among other things. We enable this to happen by creating an atmosphere of openness; while in many places young people might be scared to talk about these things, we embrace them.

Openness is created by showing humanity - by showing that teachers aren’t always happy, that we have issues and concerns, too. If students feel like they’re different, like they’re experiencing something nobody else experiences, they create a stigma for themselves. They feel more alienated. But if we’re honest about our own struggles, they won’t feel so alone and they will feel that they can talk about it more.

Enabling communication

We live in a world of mass communication. But despite this, it can be difficult to find the right ways to get students to communicate. We have “bully boxes” around the school, in which pupils can write and submit their concerns - either about themselves or others. We have a text number through which students can raise any issues they may have, which means students can start conversations they may be scared to have face to face.

In the busy school environment, we also need to make it easy for staff to communicate about students. Time is built into our schedule - it doesn’t need to take ages, only five or 10 minutes a week. It just requires a simple conversation about our observations and what we can do about them.

We also have designated administration for safeguarding, so we can keep track of what’s happening. We look at the trends; if one part of safeguarding is being repeatedly flagged up, we look at how we are dealing with this issue. Are we having enough parenting classes about it? Have we discussed it in class meetings? By having more discussions about it, again we remove the stigma and move towards a solution for the issues.

Acknowledging limits

I’ve attended multi-agency meetings about students at which the “named professional” to follow up is the school. But we aren’t professional counsellors - we specialise in education, so we don’t always have the resources. Our motto is “never overpromise, never underdeliver”. If we say we can help when we know we don’t have the resources, that’s going to break the trust; young people and parents aren’t going to come back to us if we let them down in that way.

It’s about knowing the system. If a young person comes to us about their mental health and we know the medical route is going to be quicker and more effective, they are told that. We still keep contact and show support, but we need to be honest about the best ways to help them.

I’m not scared to admit when we don’t have the answers and don’t know what to do. In my experience, parents respect that honesty. I’ve never had a parent who’s been annoyed and not accepted it. But it’s important that we couple that honesty with showing that we still care. We still check up on things and keep an eye on their child.

We need to destigmatise safeguarding as much as we can. It’s important to allow good communication by being non-judgemental, and to provide a platform for this communication. Ultimately, it’s important not to be scared of safeguarding because it is the most important thing we do as schools.

Vic Goddard is principal of Passmores Academy in Harlow, Essex. He was talking to Georgia Ziebart