What your school can do in response to Everyone’s Invited

Everyone’s Invited has given voice to many victims of sexual violence, abuse and harassment in schools and universities across the UK and further afield. The behaviour described within the accounts of victims provides a lens that it appears, many schools have not been aware of, and in serious examples, may have ignored.

Many of the testimonies describe behaviour by students and staff which has trivialised and normalised poor and on occasions illegal conduct. The impact of this creates a culture that undermines safeguarding and has not made school a safe place for all children.

What is clear is that policy alone isn’t working. Keeping Children Safe in Education is leading the world when it comes to global safeguarding at a national level. Yet, Everyone’s Invited has demonstrated that just because you have Safeguarding and Child Protection policy, that it’s intentions are actually working in practice.

For well over a year now we have been investigating this issue. We have completed many interviews with school leaders on their struggles to effectively implement safeguarding policy into practice and to get meaningful data on the impact on reducing the risk of safeguarding harm within the community. We have been seeking to understand the tools and resources that are needed to enable a school to be more effective. So school boards and governing bodies have tangible datasets to understand risks, make judgements and mitigate safeguarding risks within their communities.

9ine’s Safeguarding Governance & Risk Management App module enables schools to effectively monitor and manage tasks, actions, activities and risks. The architecture, based on 9ine’s Governance, Risk and Compliance technology provides an environment that manages and evidences the daily, weekly and monthly activities to demonstrate effective practices in managing and maintaining a high standard of safeguarding practise.

The outcome of our research is a complimentary module to our privacy technology. The 9ine Safeguarding App module will support your school in managing governance, risk and compliance in safeguarding. Our technology will support schools with visibility over their safeguarding programmes, enabling them to make quicker and better decisions to protect their students and communities.

The benefits of our technology include:

• Give confidence to your community that you understand and can evidence your safeguarding responsibilities
• Demonstrate organisational wide accountability through roles and responsibilities
• Plan key safeguarding activities using integrated task and project management features, automating and operationalising your safeguarding policies
• Intelligent alerts, raising awareness to tasks and activities that, if left unattended, increases the risk of harm to your community
• A common vocabulary of safeguarding risks, driven by our quick-start risk database, where you can select common safeguarding risks, evidencing your mitigation approach. These risks can then be actively managed and reported on
• Empower your safeguarding team to manage and respond to safeguarding themes through powerful reporting and management features
• Provide a managed whistleblowing mechanism so staff and students can anonymously report their concerns, providing intelligence to your safeguarding risk management
• Operationalise the management and reporting of safeguarding risks, ensuring all those that need to know safeguarding risks, have the access and the information
• Rich reporting to provide your governing body or board with data to inform their response in the allocation of resources to manage safeguarding risk at your school

To be the first schools using our Safeguarding technology register for our early adopter programme or request a demo of how our privacy technology reduces your schools data protection and cyber risks.