Safeguarding
Holy Trinity Catholic School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expects all staff to share this commitment.
Holy Trinity Catholic School follows the requirements of Birmingham Local Authority for safer recruitment in accordance with the School Staffing (England) Regulations 2009 for the safe and legal employment of people to work in school and Keeping Children Safe in Education 2024
The Governing Body is fully committed to the welfare of children and young people in its care. It recognises fully that the legal requirements for recruiting and employing people to work in the school include provisions specifically to protect children from harm and that following these provisions is an essential part of its duty of care. It also recognises that the legal requirements for checking prospective employees’ right to work in the UK protect those responsible for recruitment from fines and infringing the law. As such we have a rigorous and robust process to ensure that all safer recruitment checks and fully implemented at all levels of recruitment to ensure that our students are kept safe at all times.
The safer recruitment policy is to be read and understood in line with other additional safeguarding policies, including safeguarding and child protection polices, attendance, anti-bullying, behaviour and health and safety, staff code of conduct, and whistle blowing policy
Safeguarding and child protection policy
Safer recruitment
Holy Trinity Catholic School is committed to keeping our students safe, both in school and the wider community. As part of our safeguarding arrangements, we have a two-way information sharing agreement in place with West Midlands Police. The agreement is compliant with Crime & Disorder Act 1998, Data Protection Act 2018 – 2021 Update and United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK-GDPR); and focuses on preventing young people from becoming involved, or further involved, in crime and anti-social behaviour, as either a victim or offender. If you have any queries about the partnership policy, please contact Deputy Head Teacher, Mrs Daw
Promoting and Ensuring Equality and Respect.
Eradicating all forms of child on child abuse and harassment at Holy Trinity Catholic School (formerly known as peer on peer abuse).
All children have the right to be safe inside and outside of school. At the heart of our school ethos are the core values of ‘Respect’ and ‘Equality’. Our Mission statement identifies that we are a ‘caring community’ where ‘all are respected as equal’. We recognise as an inclusive school, the importance of celebrating the core values and beliefs, which unite us. As one community made in the Image of God we are welcoming and tolerant of all. Being made in God’s image we should ‘Learn to love and love to learn’ in order to be the best we can be and to affect positively the lives of others and society in general. We are creating the next generation of pupils who are leaders, who know right from wrong and are able to develop a clear sense of responsibility and morale purpose in their decisions and actions- those who can be the voice and hand of good and the voice of the voiceless.
Last year, Ofsted published its report on child on child abuse in schools. We know that all forms of bullying, discrimination and violence have no place in society and certainly not in schools. This includes all forms of sexual abuse and harassment. The report says that sexual harassment is so commonplace in some schools that some students do not feel it is worth reporting it. At Holy Trinity all children, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation, have the right to equal protection from all types of harm or abuse and everyone has a role to play in preventing all forms of abuse including face to face and online which are equally damaging and both of which are taken very seriously.
Ofsted advises that schools should act on the assumption that peer-on-peer sexual abuse is an issue in schools and should work to develop a culture where all kinds of bullying, violence, harassment, sexual harassment and abuse, prejudice and lack of tolerance is recognised and addressed. This will include instances of incidents outside of school and those that take place online. It is important that these are addressed in schools so that pupils are safe, that they are able to make safe and sensible choices in the future, that they know what to do if they are at risk of or suffer harm and that they understand that they have a voice to speak out when and if they are victims. Pupils also need to know how to challenge what is wrong if they see or know that something is happening to someone else which may leave them at risk.
We have robust processes to address all forms of child on child abuse and a clear plan to stamp out harassment and abuse of all kinds when it occurs between students.
Ongoing work to develop understanding of child on child abuse.
Firstly, we have clarified within our school setting what “sexual harassment/abuse” means. In our school, we define harassment as “unwanted attention that makes you feel uncomfortable”.
We want to remove the word “sexual” because we felt this could mislead students to think that only certain explicit behaviours were sexual harassment, rather than seeing the broader definition. All forms of harassment are unacceptable.
We will be conducting our own student voice surveys as well as staff surveys. Not only do we feel it is important to take our students’ own voices and experiences into account, but also know this is the first step in raising the profile and starting the conversation around this very complex issue. We also conduct a parent voice survey asking parents to comment on whether they feel that their child is safe at school. Parents can use this forum to feedback any questions, concerns or issues that they may have. The survey is evaluated by a member of the SLT team, any issues or concerns are followed up and dealt with by the appropriate member of staff. The survey will be sent to all parents each term.
The student voice Health, safety and wellbeing committee have been pivotal in terms of putting together the content and questions for our forthcoming pupil questionnaire. All staff have also been given the opportunity to contribute to a staff questionnaire.
We continue to ensure that all staff are aware of the issues surrounding equality and child and child abuse and work closely with out partners outside of education. Our local school link police officer, our student social workers and school nurse help us to reinforce our key messages and offer support and some joined up thinking in terms of how we address these challenges.
Our focus is for pupils to know what constitutes unacceptable behaviour and to report it. Birmingham is adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ stance towards child on child abuse. Ofsted cites that one reason why students did not come forward to report incidents of sexual harassment was because they were worried about what would happen if they did; that they might get in trouble or that the information, once out of their hands, would be out of their control. We need students to be explicitly aware of what happens when they report and that it is important that they do so.
Our Safeguarding and child protection policy has been updated in line with Keeping Children Safe 2024 and with BCT and Wet Midlands Police guidance to include all aspects of child on child abuse.
As a school, we have delivered additional training inputs to all staff around child on child abuse. This training is ongoing with further inputs over the year. Additional training is provided for those who may work to support any prospective victims and or offenders. The impact of this is that the staff are highly alert to identify situations of concerns and to escalate and support accordingly. As we progress, we will be looking at the following areas:
- What constitutes sexual harassment.
- Recognising “low-level” instances – considering the intention of the perpetrator.
- Considering and being aware of your own bias.
- Responding to low-level instances in a safe and respectful way.
- Removing “gender”. We want to ensure that students and staff don’t see this as boys vs girls or men vs women. This is a human issue and should be treated as such. We’ll be avoiding stereotyping and generalisations as much as possible.
- Appropriate vocabulary to use (the Ofsted report explores that using the word “victim” is not necessarily appropriate as some may not wish to be seen as or perceive themselves as such).
At this point, we are in the early stages of our journey and have identified three key areas we are going to work on in our initial steps to help us to protect students from sexual harassment in school. These are policy, staff training and education.
Pupil Education:
This work is ongoing in school. We are looking to challenge behaviours which have been ‘hidden’ for long time in society in general and may be prevalent in all works of life. To make a significant change for good we know that we need to educate the young people, our children, of today, so this can be challenged. Much of our groundwork is already embedded at Holy Trinity. Nonetheless we continue to be reflective, (We never think it cannot happen here) and to strengthen this further as we seek to address all forms of abuse and harassment at its most fundamental level. As a result, the next generation will have a stronger understanding and a louder voice when speaking out about inequalities and all forms of abuse in society.
