St Joseph's Catholic Primary School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

What is Safeguarding?

Safeguarding is the action that is taken to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm.

Safeguarding means:

• Protecting children from abuse and maltreatment
• Preventing harm to children’s health or development
• Ensuring children grow up with the provision of safe and effective care
• Taking action to enable all children and young people to have the best outcomes.

Child protection is part of the safeguarding process. It focuses on protecting individual children identified as suffering or likely to suffer significant harm. This includes child protection procedures which detail how to respond to concerns about a child.

Safeguarding children and child protection applies to all children up to the age of 18.

Policies and Documents

We have a number of policies and procedures in place that contribute to our safeguarding commitment, including our Safeguarding Policy.  We also adhere to the following three DFE safeguarding documents:

• Working Together to Safeguard Children July 2023
• Keeping Children Safe in Education September 2024
• The Prevent Duty 2015

Sometimes we may need to share information and work in partnership with other agencies, when there are concerns about a child's welfare. We will ensure that our concerns about our pupils are discussed with parents/carers first, unless we have reason to believe that such a move would be contrary to the child's welfare.

We actively support the Government's Prevent Agenda to counter radicalism and extremism. 

Our Designated Safeguarding Lead is Mrs Sinead Killian (Deputy Headteacher). In the absence of our Deputy Headteacher members of the Senior Leadership team and our Family Workers are all trained to the same level and will deputise when required.

Photographs and Videos

Whilst lots of parents and carers really enjoy seeing photos and videos of their children’s school life we are very mindful of our duty of care towards all our pupils. We take the issue of safeguarding very seriously and this includes the use of photographic and video images.

Any photographs or videos taken by parents, carers and relatives at school productions, sports days or other events are for the enjoyment of individual families. They must not be used in any way that could potentially place a child at risk. This would include publishing images in any form of print or on the internet including social networking sites.

In order to celebrate children's learning and achievements we use  photographs of our children on our website, in school documents, for parent information meetings, newsletters and on our displays around the school. In line with our school policy no child is identified by name and if  you do not wish photographs of your child to be used for these purposes, then please contact the Head teacher.

Parents

Working closely with parents is paramount in our aim to keeping children safe and preventing them from harm. Please see our PARENTS ADVICE section for National Agency support for parents around all safeguarding areas and our KEEPING SAFE ONLINE section.

Please click below for some useful websites.

 

Please click on the attachments below to access further information.