Keeping Learners Safe: evidencing the local context for a school in Wales
Schools in Wales work to Keeping Learners Safe, not Keeping Children Safe in Education, within the Wales Safeguarding Procedures and a regional safeguarding board, and they are inspected by Estyn. Much of the advice written for England carries over. The sources and the structures do not always. This guide sets out the differences.
What the guidance asks
Keeping Learners Safe does not give schools a template for their local context. It asks each school to fit its arrangements to its own setting:
“each school will need to consider how it addresses its needs in line with its own unique circumstances”
A school's circumstances include the area around it: the roads, stops and open spaces pupils use, what is recorded there, and what the local authority and its partners are seeing. Knowing them is part of addressing the school's needs, and writing them down, dated, shows it was done.
The local arrangements
In Wales the multi-agency arrangements sit with six regional safeguarding boards, each covering several local authorities, and the Wales Safeguarding Procedures “are owned by the safeguarding boards in Wales” (Keeping learners safe, paragraph 1.16). A school's policy should name its regional board and the local authority's route for reporting a concern about a child. Every school page on this site names both for a school in Wales.
Where the Welsh sources differ from England's
- Children's services. The Department for Education's assessment factors cover England only. For Wales, the Welsh Government publishes children's safeguarding measures for each local authority, including counts of children where exploitation or going missing was a factor. They describe the whole authority, never a school.
- Deprivation. Wales uses the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation, not the English indices. The two are built differently and their ranks cannot be compared across the border.
- Police-recorded crime. The four Welsh forces publish on the same monthly basis as England's, so the picture around the gate and on the routes in can be read in the same way.
- Health. Several of the young people's health indicators published for English authorities have no Welsh equivalent at the same level, and a report should say so rather than borrow an English figure.
Writing it for Estyn and the governing body
This is our advice, not wording from the guidance. Keep the language Welsh throughout: Keeping Learners Safe, the designated safeguarding person, the regional safeguarding board, Estyn. A paragraph that borrows English terms reads as borrowed. Describe the surroundings plainly, state the limits of each source in the same sentence, and tie each point to something the school does: training, a conversation with the board, a change to supervision at the end of the day. Date it and review it each year with the policy, and report it to the governing body.
The safeguarding context report writes a Welsh school's report to Keeping Learners Safe, the regional board and Estyn throughout, and never mentions Ofsted.
Quotations are from Welsh Government guidance, Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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