Safeguarding

What is Safeguarding?

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

Keeping children safe is central to everything we do, from risk assessments for trips, fire drills, safer recruitment processes, welfare/medical procedures, supervision ratios, curriculum coverage, enhanced DBS checks for all staff, to enabling mechanisms for pupil voice and reporting hazards on site.

A specific branch of our safeguarding responsibility is called ‘Child Protection’ and this puts a duty on all members of staff to promote the welfare of all children and protect them from actual or suspected harm, defined as follows:

• protecting children from maltreatment (neglect, physical, emotional and sexual)

• preventing impairment of children’s health or development

• ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care

• taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes (including referral to children’s social care for statutory assessments under the Children Act 1989, especially section 17 [children in need] and section 47 [a child suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm]).

Our statutory duty to protect children from harm is clearly set out in government guidance, ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’.

If you have a concern about the welfare of a child, please get in touch immediately with Fiona Crean, Headteacher and DSL.

Email head@belmont-inf.haringey.sch.uk or safeguarding@belmontjnr.haringey.sch.uk 

If you would like advice from Haringey’s Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (social care), they can be contacted as follows:

• Monday to Thursday 8.45am to 5pm; Friday 8.45am to 4.45pm
  Tel: 020 8489 4470

• Out of office hours, including weekends the Emergency Duty Team
  Tel: 020 8489 0000

For more information see Haringey's Child Protection site

Mandatory Reporting of FGM

It is mandatory for teachers, health and social workers to report to the police if they find, or are told, someone under 18 has undergone FGM. 

Prevent Duty

All registered childcare providers are subject to a duty under section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, in the exercise of their functions, to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. This duty is known as the Prevent duty.  It is intended to help schools and childcare providers think about what they can do to protect children from the risk of radicalisation4 and suggests how they can access support to do this. It reflects actions that many schools and childcare providers will already be taking to protect children from this risk