Our Lady of Pity RC Primary School 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 takes place at the start of every academic year.

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 Our Lady of Pity

We have five trained Designated Safeguarding Leads:

Mrs K Dunne – Senior DSL

Mrs C Peers, Mrs N McShane, Mrs E Lambe and Mr A James

Our Designated Safeguarding Governor is Mrs A Boekweit-Hughes

All Staff members at Our Lady of Pity RC Primary School are trained to safeguard pupils.

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 the policies section of the website or by using the link below.

Guidance and advice about how to keep your child safe online can be found in the Online Safety page under ‘Curriculum’.

Operation Encompass

The 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 (witnessed by a child) has been reported to police.

Following a domestic incident, the Police will make contact with the school via email and communicate relevant information to nominated, fully-trained school staff. This will ensure that we are made aware early enough to support children.

Operation Encompass Process  Map

 http://www.operationencompass.org/

Want to know more about keeping your child safe?

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 Our Lady of Pity RC Primary School regularly update their training around the government’s Prevent Strategy. This strategy aims to safeguard vulnerable people from being radicalised, supporting terrorism or becoming terrorists themselves.