Do CPOMS and MyConcern cover contextual safeguarding?

Two different jobs

Safeguarding record-keeping systems such as CPOMS and MyConcern are where a school records and manages concerns about its own pupils: who raised the concern, what was seen, what was done, and who was told. They hold what the school knows. Used well, they are also a source of contextual evidence, because the school's own records show when and where concerns arise.

Contextual safeguarding needs a second kind of evidence as well: what is known about the area from outside the school. The guidance asks every member of staff to “consider whether children are at risk of abuse or exploitation in situations outside their families” (Keeping children safe in education 2026, paragraph 21), and Ofsted looks for schools that stay alert to harm “whether within or outside the home or online”. Much of that picture is published, and none of it arrives in a school's records by itself:

• what children's social care records at assessment across the local authority, such as criminal and sexual exploitation, gangs and going missing, beside England;
• what the police record at the streets around the gate and along the routes in;
• the parks, stops and stations where pupils wait and gather after school;
• young people's health and youth justice figures for the authority, and domestic abuse for the police force area;
• the local safeguarding partnership, its threshold document and the council's route for reporting a concern.

Using both together

This is our advice, not wording from the guidance.

1. Record concerns about places, not only children. If staff hear that pupils are being approached at a particular stop, log it in your recording system even when no child is yet named. That is the school's own contextual evidence.
2. Review your records by place and time once a term. Look for streets, stops or times of day that recur in concerns.
3. Set them beside the public evidence once a year. The authority's children's services figures and the police record around the gate say whether what the school sees is part of a wider local pattern.
4. Write both into one paragraph in the child protection policy, dated, with what the school does about each point, and report it to governors.

Where Safeguarding Context fits

Safeguarding Context does the third step for one school: it gathers the public evidence, in the guidance's own words, and writes it into the policy paragraph, the governors' paragraph and a one-page staff briefing. It holds nothing about pupils and never rates the school, so it sits beside a recording system rather than replacing one. Read a sample report to see what it produces.

CPOMS and MyConcern are the trademarks of their owners. Safeguarding Context is not connected with either. Quotations are from Department for Education and Ofsted guidance, Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.