What a trust should tell its board about local safeguarding risks

What inspectors expect of oversight

Ofsted's toolkit describes safeguarding that is met in these terms:

For a trust, strategic oversight means the board can see that every school knows its surroundings and acts on them, and that the trust knows where its schools' contexts differ.

What to put in front of the board

This is our advice, not wording from the guidance.

1. One paragraph per school, from that school's own evidence: what its authority's children's services record, what is around its gate, and what the school has done about it this year.
2. Every school side by side, in alphabetical order, never ranked. Show which authorities and partnerships the estate spans, and where a harm is recorded more often than England, so the board can see common training needs.
3. The partnerships each school works within, since a trust across several authorities works to several threshold documents. Our list of partnerships gives each.
4. The actions, with owners and dates, carried from last year's review to this one.
5. A date for the next review, aligned with each school's child protection policy review.

Why never rank

A table that ranks schools by their surroundings invites the board to treat the school in the busiest area as the problem. The context is about pupils' lives outside the school, not the school's performance, and a quiet area is not a safe child.

How Safeguarding Context helps a trust

One order covers the whole estate, at the same price for every school. Each school gets its own report and briefing, and the trust gets every school side by side, never ranked, with a paragraph for the trust board. See the trust pricing and a sample report.

Quotation from Ofsted guidance, Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.