Safeguarding should be at the forefront of every manager or company director’s mind if you work with vulnerable people or children. We look at five ways to actually improve the levels of safeguarding in your organisation.
1. Ensure you have a robust Safeguarding Policy
There’s not much point even thinking about tackling safeguarding procedures unless you have a robust policy on how your company improves safeguarding. This policy should be updated regularly.
2. Ensure staff read and understand the policy
It’s all well and good writing up a policy, but unless it’s accessible to staff, both physically and mentally, then there’s no point. This means that firstly the staff can actually access the policy whenever they need to. Secondly, it means that the policy needs to be easy to read, digest and understand.
3. Talk it through with vulnerable adults or children
If your company needs a good safeguarding policy, it’s probably because you work with or care for children or vulnerable adults as part of your business activity. It’s probably only right then that they too have read and understood the policy seeing as it affects them. They may even have suggestions on your safeguarding policy that you hadn’t thought of yourself. It’s important that the vulnerable people you work with understand terms such as criminal record check so they know how they are being safeguarded as well as why.
4. Safeguarding training and awareness
If your organisation or company works with children or vulnerable adults, then safeguarding training should be an expense you never avoid. All staff who work directly with children and vulnerable adults should have direct, on-site training (not just online training) and any other staff should have safeguarding awareness training at the very least. Allow your training budget to rise with inflation so you can always afford it. Alternatively, have a set ‘safeguarding budget’ that includes a budget for both training and for a criminal record check for new members of staff.
5. What about volunteers?
Don’t forget, it’s not just staff that need to understand the policy and be trained in safeguarding, volunteers should adhere to the same standards. Volunteers should be subject to the same criminal record check as staff.
These five tips alone should dramatically improve the levels of safeguarding in your organisation.
