Questions
Questions about the safeguarding context report
What designated safeguarding leads, trust safeguarding leads and governors ask before they order, answered plainly. Prices and payment are on the pricing page.
The questions DSLs ask
Is this report required by Keeping Children Safe in Education or Ofsted?
No. Neither Keeping Children Safe in Education nor the Ofsted inspection toolkit requires any particular report. The guidance asks the designated safeguarding lead to consider whether children are at risk of abuse or exploitation in situations outside their families, and inspectors look for a school that stays alert to the risks its pupils face. The report gathers the public evidence for that, ties each part to the words of the guidance it answers, and writes it into the documents where it is used. A school can assemble the same evidence by hand; the report saves the day or two that takes for each school, every year.
Does the report rate or rank our school?
No. The report describes the context around a school: what children's services record across the local authority, and what is recorded in the streets around the gate and on the routes in. It never rates the school or its pupils. A trust's schools are set side by side in alphabetical order and never ranked, and a quiet area is described as quiet.
Can anything in the report identify a pupil?
No. Every count below three is printed as "fewer than 3", police-recorded crime is published by the police at anonymised map points, and the figures about harm to children are for the whole local authority, never for the school. The report says plainly that no public source shows harm affecting your own pupils; that picture comes from your safeguarding partnership, the police and your own records.
What do we receive for each school?
A binder-ready PDF report that sets out the evidence chapter by chapter and ends with the paragraph for the child protection policy, the paragraph for the governors' annual safeguarding report and the questions an inspector may ask, answered. With it come a one-page staff briefing, an insight dashboard with the figures for the year and an action log that turns each finding into an action with an owner and a due date. A trust holding two or more schools also gets a portfolio with every school side by side.
Where do the figures come from?
From published public sources, each printed with its publisher and period: the Department for Education register of schools; the Department for Education's children in need statistics, or the Welsh Government's children's safeguarding measures in Wales; the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities' public health profiles; the Office for National Statistics domestic abuse data; police-recorded crime through UK Crime Statistics; Department for Transport road casualty statistics; Defra's modelled air quality; the English Indices of Deprivation and the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation; OS Open Greenspace and the national public transport stop register; and each safeguarding partnership's own website. Public sector information is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Does it work for schools in Wales?
Yes. A Welsh school's report is written to Keeping Learners Safe, the regional safeguarding board and Estyn throughout, and never mentions Ofsted. Children's services figures come from the Welsh Government's safeguarding measures for the authority, and deprivation from the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation.
How is this different from a crime map?
A crime map shows how much is recorded around an address. It cannot show what children's services record about harm to children in your authority, which places matter in the hour after school, where to refer a concern, or what to write in the policy. Police-recorded crime is one chapter of the report, from UK Crime Statistics, our sister service; the rest is evidence a crime map does not carry.
What does the report say when the area around the school is quiet?
It says the area is quiet. That is useful evidence in its own right: it shows the school has looked, and it keeps the policy and the staff briefing proportionate. Figures are set against the national picture so a quiet neighbourhood reads as quiet rather than as a list of incidents.
Can a trust order for every school at once?
Yes. A trust can put every school on one order, at the same price for each. Every school gets its own report, briefing, dashboard and action log, and the portfolio sets them side by side, never ranked, with a paragraph for the trust board.
How long does access last, and does it renew?
An order covers each school for 12 months from delivery. The report and the staff briefing are dated for the annual policy review, and the dashboard and the action log stay open for the year. Nothing renews or charges automatically: we email a reminder a month before the year ends, and renewing brings the new year's figures and keeps the action log.
Can we see what is available for our school before ordering?
Yes. Every open school in England and Wales has a free page on this site with its register entry, its local safeguarding partnership and the council's page for reporting a concern, a summary of the area around it and the schools nearest to it. Find it by name from the search box at the top of any page.
Who is it written for?
Designated safeguarding leads and their deputies, trust safeguarding leads who need the same evidence for every school they hold, and governors and heads of small schools who hold the safeguarding lead role themselves and need the governor paragraph written.
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Longer answers
- Do CPOMS and MyConcern cover contextual safeguarding?
- Is a crime map enough evidence of local risks for Ofsted?
- How a designated safeguarding lead can gather the local context themselves
- What to look for in a contextual safeguarding report or tool
- What is a safeguarding threshold document, and where is my area's?
- What a trust should tell its board about local safeguarding risks
- The local context in a section 175 or 157 safeguarding audit
Something else?
Email info@safeguardingcontext.co.uk, or start with your school's free page: find your school.