Contextual safeguarding in a school policy: a worked paragraph

Start with the place, not the pupils

The paragraph describes the environment around the school and the routes children take to it. It does not describe the pupils, and it does not rank the area. Every sentence should be something a governor could check against a published source or a school record.

The worked paragraph

Sentence one: where the school is. "The school sits on [road name] in [neighbourhood], with the main entrance on a [residential street or a classified road], and most pupils arrive on foot from the [direction] along [named routes]."

Sentence two: what the public data shows. "Police-recorded crime and anti-social behaviour within a short walk of the gate over the last twelve months were [above, around or below] the level for the wider area, with [the most common category] the largest single category and [a named location] the place most often recorded."

Sentence three: the exploitation picture, stated within its limits. "The public indicators of criminal and sexual exploitation in the area are [present or not prominent] in the recorded data; the school treats them as prompts for vigilance, not as evidence about any pupil."

Sentence four: the roads. "Collision records for the roads at the gate and on the main walking routes show [number] injury collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists in the last five years, [with or without] any at the school entrance itself."

Sentence five: what the school does about it. "Staff safeguarding training therefore covers [the named harms], the school has raised [the road concern] with the highway authority, and this paragraph is reviewed each [month] against the current data."

Why each sentence is there

• The first sentence stops the paragraph being generic. Any reader can picture the gate.
• The second puts a number, or at least a comparison, on the record so the paragraph can be updated and its change tracked.
• The third is the one most often overclaimed. Saying what the data cannot show is part of understanding it.
• The fourth brings in road danger, which is the most common physical risk on the way to school and the most often left out of a safeguarding policy.
• The fifth turns description into action. Without it the paragraph is a landscape, not a policy.

Filling in the blanks

Each bracket in the paragraph maps to a chapter of the safeguarding context report: the recorded picture at the gate, drawn from UK Crime Statistics, then exploitation indicators, places and routes where risk sits, and road danger at the gate. The report finishes with this paragraph written out for the school in question, with the figures in place and the sources printed. Every school page on this site shows the register entry the report starts from.

Find your school by local authority, then order its report from the school page.