The Church of England published the National Safeguarding Standards in October 2023. The Standards and Quality Assurance Framework are essential for the Church to understand the quality and, most importantly, the impact of its safeguarding activity. In addition, the Standards provide a simple construct which integrates the complexity of all safeguarding activity in the Church. All such activities, at all levels across the Church, will relate to at least one Standard. Thus, the Standards provide a means of connecting and integrating what might otherwise be experienced as disconnected activities and enable the Church to easily communicate its commitment to safeguarding.
The Five Standards are:
- Culture, Leadership and Capacity: Church bodies have safe and healthy cultures, effective leadership, resourcing, and scrutiny arrangements necessary to deliver high-quality safeguarding practices and outcomes.
- Prevention: Church bodies have in place a planned range of measures which together are effective in preventing abuse in their context.
- Recognising, Assessing and Managing Risk: Risk assessments, safety plans and associated processes are of a high quality and result in positive outcomes. The assessment and management of risk is underpinned by effective partnership working.
- Victims and Survivors: Victims and survivors experience the timeliness and quality of Church bodies' responses to disclosures, and their subsequent support, as positively meeting their needs, including their search for justice, and helping their healing process.
- Learning, Supervision and Support: All those engaged in safeguarding-related activity in Church bodies receive the type and level of learning, professional development, support, and supervision necessary to respond to safeguarding situations, victims and survivors, and respondents, effectively.
Each Standard contains:
- A statement of the Standard itself.
- An explanation of why it is important.
- A series of 'What Good Looks Like' Indicators - these are detailed criteria that show how well a Standard is being achieved.
- Details of relevant House of Bishops' Guidance and Code, training, resources, and tools that can be used to help gather data relevant to the indicators. These are important as they will equip Church bodies with the means to undertake quality assurance work locally, but also in a way that is consistent across other bodies.
It is not expected that every Church body will be able to meet every indicator overnight. The Standards set out the direction of travel and will enable Church bodies to identify both their strengths and areas for development, which will in turn inform their strategic planning in respect of safeguarding.
The current version of the National Safeguarding Standards and Quality Assurance Framework were approved by the National Safeguarding Steering Group (NSSG) in July 2023.
Quality assurance processes only have value if they drive continuous safeguarding improvement in the organisation. Quality assurance information should encourage discussion and reflection within the organisation. This enables the following questions to be considered: What is this telling us? What does this mean for us? What do we need to do?
The timeline for quality assurance visits including the preparation required is detailed below:
Week -4
- Four weeks ahead of the proposed quality assurance visit, the National Learning and Development Manager or Safeguarding Lead that will be completing the quality assurance visit and tasks will contact the Safeguarding Officer and Trainer of the diocese/cathedral to be visited.
- The quality assurance toolkit for standard 5 ‘Safeguarding Learning, Supervision and Support’ will be sent via email, this toolkit contains the checklists and templates that will be utilised during the site visit.
- A date for the site visit will be mutually agreed.
The diocese/cathedral will begin collating the document necessary to complete the quality assurance checklists and identify potential dates for training observations
– two sessions will be observed, these can be in-person or virtual sessions. If virtual, sessions can be at any time in the period leading up to the site visit. If in-person, the session/s to be observed should be on the date of the site visit and the duration of the visit will be adjusted to accommodate this.
Week -3 to Week -1
- The diocese/cathedral will make all necessary arrangements for the site visit, ensuring documentation is ready, training observations are arranged, and people involved in meetings will be available during the day of the visit.
- The National Learning and Development Manager or Safeguarding Lead visiting will observe the virtual sessions identified for them and prepare feedback for the facilitators involved to be provided on the day of the visit.
Site Visit
- The National Learning and Development Manager or Safeguarding Lead will meet with the facilitators of the sessions observed to provide feedback on the sessions observed.
- The National Learning and Development Manager or Safeguarding Lead will meet with the Safeguarding Officer and Trainer/s and the manager of the safeguarding team for the diocese/cathedral to cover the governance points. During this meeting the National Learning and Development Manager will also provide feedback to those present on the sessions observed.
- Areas of strength will be identified and areas for potential improvement will be discussed.
Week +2
- No later than two weeks after the site visit, the National Learning and Development Manager or Safeguarding Lead overseeing the quality assurance for the site will present the finding the quality assurance visit using the report template. This report will summarise the discussions of the day and the feedback provided.
To enable quality assurance of safeguarding learning a series of tools have been developed:
- Template for auditing the governance for the delivery of safeguarding learning.
This asks key questions in relation to the strategic planning for delivery of safeguarding learning and the oversight that Church bodies have over their learning provision.
- Observation checklist for auditing the delivery of safeguarding learning.
- This sets out the key practice issues to look for when observing someone facilitating safeguarding learning activities.
- Facilitators checklist for self-auditing the delivery of safeguarding learning.
- This sets out the key practice issues for facilitators to reflect upon after facilitating safeguarding learning activities.
- Peer audit checklist for peer audit of delivery of safeguarding learning.
- This sets out the key practice issues for peer auditors to reflect upon after observing safeguarding learning activities.
- Example documentation which will support the recruitment of volunteer safeguarding trainers.
Volunteer safeguarding trainer role description.
Questionnaire for volunteer safeguarding trainers.
- Template for Quality Assurance Report.
- This summarises the feedback, strengths and areas of improvement identified during the quality assurance visit.