We all know the analogy… you are tempted to go to the people who are screaming for help and who superficially appear to have the most serious injuries. However, what we should do is look for the people who are silent, check that those who look okay don’t have even more severe internal damage. I passionately believe that sometimes we need to apply this analogy to schools and safeguarding. 

I spend lots of time providing safeguarding supervision, conducting safeguarding audits, and generally supporting schools around children that they are working with for all sorts of reasons. Of course, I am not suggesting that we ignore children who are on Child Protection Plans, children who are looked after or those children who exist on all sorts of vulnerable lists, because that is literally what I have spent my entire career shouting about. I am however, always interested to know how systems in schools support DSLs to know who they don’t know about. This is when I am reassured that safeguarding systems are genuinely robust. I feel we also have to have this same philosophy for SENCO roles, and other pastoral roles, as the same logic should be applied. What about the children who aren’t screaming? What about those children and young people who’s strategy for survival is to become the wall paper?

It is so easy for children to go under the radar, we know about the ones where there are other services involved, and a key part of the school role is doing their bit for these children and also holding other services to account. In reality though, these children should have regular reviews, meetings, plans in place that means that there are defined points in time where we are checking what is going on for them. What can happen however, is that we spend hours and hours talking about these same children, and hours that don’t necessarily result in any further actions or impact. The danger is that we get so embedded and embroiled in their story, that we don’t take a step back to ensure that our involvement is actually making a difference, and whilst ever we are in this child’s story, we could be oblivious to someone else’s. The importance of Safeguarding Supervision is that it should provide an opportunity to reflect on what’s going well, what are we still concerned about and what needs to happen next. It should also provide an opportunity to consider children who maybe aren’t talked about quite as much. 

When we think of the large secondary schools, and the number of children who walk through their doors, how on earth can we know about every child. The worry is that we don’t know about every child. Every child deserves to have someone checking that everything is okay. Some children have developed phenomenal strategies to cope with the most adverse circumstances, and this means that they never scream for help, or even politely request it. We only need to consider some of our Young Carers to appreciate the resilience and ability of some children to deal with inordinate amounts of pressure, responsibility and emotional stress, yet they turn up for school each day and present as if they are no different to their peers. Consider those children with really serious medical conditions who manage their daily tablet taking and constant risk assessments, and never complain or cause a fuss. These are the children who we could easily miss. Not to mention those children suffering daily abuse and trauma that have not been, and may never be, discovered. Children don’t necessarily break and tell someone; they are perhaps more likely to get more adept at coping and thus the likelihood of discovery actually reduces over time. 

It makes me think of a piece of work I was involved in a few years ago, which involved the development of a First Day Calling Procedure for school. This is fairly embedded across schools now and is something I obviously always ask about when completing safeguarding reviews. For anyone not working in education, in a nutshell this is the procedure schools follow when a child is absent and is about ensuring that if the school have not heard from a parent or carer to explain the absence, we keep checking until we know the child is safe. Now understandably majority of schools prioritise those children who are known to be vulnerable when following their procedures, and you can see the care and logic behind this. I, however, always feel compelled to remind schools, that First Day Calling Procedures came about due to a number of incidences involving children and families that would not have been considered vulnerable. Families that would have been on no-one’s list. I raise the point that these families not contacting the school about their child or children being absent was unusual, and therefore at this point that should have been a flag of vulnerability. They became vulnerable in that instant. 

Now I fully appreciate that the people who work in pastoral roles in schools are already overwhelmed, pushed to capacity and ridiculously busy, so I am not just trying to add to that workload. I am however passionate about doing all we can to move safeguarding systems from being reactive to proactive. Every serious case review, learning review or similar talks about the need for better communication, often between agencies, however this is a learning point for anyone working with children. The most robust, safe and proactive safeguarding systems in schools are supported by a child centred culture and ethos. They have nailed having a team approach, where key people communicate regularly to share information. Safeguarding does not rely on one DSL and a Deputy, it is intrinsic in all staff, and thus however big the actual ‘safeguarding team’, there is a genuine team approach. Of course, no one person can know about every child. However, someone in every school should know about every child, so our job is to work out how that is possible. 

How are we checking on the children who aren’t screaming and who have no superficial injuries? Are there any children that no one really knows about? How do you know children are coping? Who will notice if a child’s vulnerability changes in an instant? Are we professionally curious about the children we work with and what their lives look like? How do we ensure that we notice the children who are trying really hard not to be noticed?

“Sometimes the best hiding place is the one that’s in plain sight.” Stephanie Meyer. 

Our safest approach to keeping children safe has to be one of almost conscious incompetence, we have to assume there are children we don’t know about. It is not good enough to say it could happen here, we have to assume its already happening. This can be a scary place to be, which is why our pastoral roles need to have their emotional wellbeing prioritised. I often talk to DSLs about the children that keep them awake at night, I know a truly devoted DSL is kept awake worrying about the children that they haven’t met yet. So if after reading this, we all ask our class teachers, our form tutors and our pastoral staff who don’t we know about, maybe one more child will get rescued from the train wreck?