How a designated safeguarding lead can gather the local context themselves

The sources, and what to take from each

Everything below is published under the Open Government Licence or free to use. Work through it once a year, before the child protection policy is reviewed.

1. Children's social care, for your local authority. The Department for Education's children in need statistics publish, for every authority, the factors social workers recorded at the end of assessment. Take the shares for child criminal exploitation, child sexual exploitation, gangs, going missing, trafficking and abuse by another child, beside England's. In Wales, the Welsh Government publishes children's safeguarding measures by authority. Our national table sets them out for every authority.
2. Police-recorded crime around the gate. Police UK publishes street-level crime and anti-social behaviour every month. Count what is recorded within about 500 metres and a kilometre over the last twelve months, by category, and compare it with the year before. Note drugs, possession of weapons and robbery separately.
3. Places pupils wait and gather. Mark the parks and play spaces (OS Open Greenspace) and the bus stops and stations (the national public transport stop register) within a short walk.
4. Young people's health and youth justice. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities' public health profiles give hospital admissions for self-harm and violence and first-time entrants to youth justice for your authority, against England.
5. Domestic abuse. The Office for National Statistics publishes police-recorded domestic abuse for each police force area.
6. Deprivation. The English Indices of Deprivation, or the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation, give the decile of the small area the school sits in.
7. The local arrangements. Your safeguarding partnership's website for its threshold document and procedures, and the council's page for reporting a concern. Find your partnership.

Turning it into evidence

This is our advice, not wording from the guidance. For each source, write one sentence on what it shows, one on what it cannot show, and one on what the school does about it. Print any count below three as "fewer than 3" so nothing points at a person. Date the whole page, put a short version into the child protection policy, brief staff from it, and report it to governors.

How long it takes

For a designated safeguarding lead who knows where each source is, a day or two for one school, most of it in the police data and the places. It has to be done again each year, and for every school in a trust.

When buying it in makes sense

When the time is better spent elsewhere, when a trust needs the same evidence for many schools in the same form, or when a governor holds the safeguarding lead role and has no one to delegate to. A Safeguarding Context report does every step above for one school and writes the paragraphs. Read a sample to compare it with what you would produce yourself.