At St Mary Immaculate Catholic Primary School, safeguarding is a fundamental priority for our entire community. Our commitment is to create a safe, nurturing environment for every child, ensuring they feel secure and protected throughout their educational journey. We implement robust policies and practices that promote the welfare of all students, addressing any concerns with vigilance and care.

Regular training for staff, active communication with parents and guardians, and a clear reporting procedure are essential components of our safeguarding framework. We believe that everyone has a role in ensuring the safety and well-being of all children, and we encourage open dialogue about safeguarding issues in our school community. Together, we strive to create a supportive atmosphere where each child can thrive.

Our school is committed to actively working to safeguard all children. It is the responsibility of all of us to notice things and talk about our concerns.

Our Designated Safeguarding Lead is: Mrs Wallace. She is supported by the Deputy Designated Safeguarding Leads: Mrs Brooks, Mrs Williams and Mrs Manton.

Concerns should be reported to the DSL or to one of the Deputy DSLs. Use the contact form on this page to message the DSL directly, or phone on 01926 493959, asking to speak with a DSL. The contact form is active 24 hours a day and the office is staffed from 8am to 4.30pm each day. The number for Warwickshire’s Children’s Services is 01926 414144. Click the link below to access Warwickshire Safeguarding Children’s Board resources and further information. 

What is safeguarding?

The term safeguarding refers to the obligations some organisations have to protect people’s health, wellbeing and human rights, and to ensure a person does not suffer from harm, abuse or neglect. People in particular need of safeguarding include children, young people, and adults with learning difficulties, disabilities or who are receiving care.

The government defines safeguarding in the context of education as: protecting children from maltreatment, preventing the impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development, ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care and taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.

Ofsted describes good safeguarding as:

It is about the culture a school creates to keep its pupils safe so that they can benefit fully from all that schooling offers. A positive and open safeguarding culture puts pupils’ interests first. Everyone who works with children is vigilant in identifying risks and reporting concerns. It is also about working openly and transparently with parents, local authorities and other stakeholders to protect pupils from serious harm, both online and offline, and about taking prompt and proportionate action.

Who is responsible for safeguarding?

Legislation imposes safeguarding responsibilities on multiple organisations. The Children Act 1989 places a duty on local authorities to provide services to children in need in their area and requires them to undertake enquiries if they believe a child has suffered or is likely to suffer significant harm.

The Children Act 2004 creates “safeguarding partners” for each local authority area: the local authority, the relevant integrated care board and the police. These partners are under a duty to make arrangements to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in their area. They must also make arrangements for working with “any relevant agencies that they consider appropriate”. This is termed multi-agency working. In other words they work hand-in-hand with schools. Obligations and expectations concerning multi-agency working are set out in the statutory guidance ‘Working together to safeguard children’ (July 2023).

What are the obligations on schools?

School governing bodies have safeguarding obligations under several pieces of legislation including the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010 (including the public sector equality duty), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation. They have a strategic leadership responsibility for their school’s safeguarding arrangements and must ensure policies, procedures and training are effective and comply with the law.

Schools and colleges are also required to have regard to the government’s statutory guidance on safeguarding in education. This obligation is set out in the Education Act 2002 and various statutory instruments. The most recent guidance, ‘Keeping children safe in education: Statutory guidance for schools and colleges’, published in September 2025, states that while schools should have a “safeguarding lead”, safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is the responsibility of everyone in the school. It states they all have a role to play in “identifying concerns, sharing information and taking prompt action”. This includes staff and governing bodies.

In addition to setting out specific responsibilities for staff and governing bodies, the statutory guidance sets out information and processes concerning recruitment, allegations again staff, and child-on-child sexual violence and sexual harassment.

What should staff do?

Separate guidance for staff, entitled ‘What to do if you’re worried a child is being abused: Advice for practitioners’, published in March 2015, lists some indicators a child might be being abused or neglected that staff should watch out for. These include, among other things: behaviour changes, poor hygiene, problems at school, such as lack of concentration, being reluctant to go home after school, regularly missing school or having poor attendance and punctuality, reaching developmental milestones late without a medical reason.

There are several options for the school if staff have concerns about a child’s welfare: we can provide extra support for the child internally, we can offer Early Support for the family to access some external resources and agencies or we cna make a referral to statutory services such as children’s social care.

In the first instance staff have to record their concerns. At St Mary Immaculate we use a digital system called CPOMS to record these concerns. It is a statutory requirement and we must document the decision made and the reasoning behind the decision for all concerns that are raised. Initially staff are almost always asked to talk to families about the concern, having consulted with the Designated Safeguarding Lead, known as the DSL, (Mrs Wallace) or the Deputy DSLs (Mrs Brooks, Mrs Williams, Mrs Manton) first. Often this results in staff just keeping an extra eye out for the child. Sometimes, not often, concerns are of a more serious nature and a referral needs to be made to Warwickshire’s safeguarding children partnership, currently via the “Family Connect”.

The statutory nature of safeguarding guidance means that all staff are required to notice things and we have a strong culture at St Mary Immaculate of it being everyone’s responsibility to notice things in our school.

Protective Behaviours

We teach a comprehensive Protective Behaviours programme for all the children from Reception to Year 6.

Protective Behaviours is a framework for personal safety consisting of 2 Themes and 7 Strategies. This is very different from the ‘lock your doors’, restrictive approach to personal safety – it is a dynamic, confidence building, empowering approach that links safety with having adventures and taking risks.

1st theme: We all have the right to feel safe all the time

With that right comes a responsibility not to do anything that would leave other people feeling unsafe and we can identify if we are feeling unsafe by tuning into our early warning signs, those things that happen in our body like butterflies in the stomach, wobbly knees etc. that let us know we don’t feel OK in this particular situation. And if we get those ‘Early Warning Signs’, PBs encourages us to think clearly about what our options are and work out what action we might need to take. That action might be to contact somebody on a support network.

2nd theme: We can talk with someone about anything, even if it feels awful or small

PBs encourages the development of a clear ‘support network’ which we can call upon having identified that we are feeling unsafe. On the support network we would ideally have 5 people who might be able to help us do some problem-solving. They might be people who ask questions so that we can come up with our own solutions; they might be people who actually give some advice; they could be friends or family or people at the end of a help line – sometimes it’s easier to ‘phone a help line as they, and us, remain anonymous. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about something that’s really terrible; it might be that we need to mull things over, or celebrate an achievement. Having four people plus the ones at home, is suggested so that we have got a bit of variety and have back up options if our first choice of contact is unavailable.

The seven ‘Strategies’ of Protective Behaviours are intended to enable us to take necessary action to feel safe again. They are designed to reinforce the two themes of Protective Behaviours, use one-step-removed approaches in our search for solutions, review our personal networks to ensure they are reliable, use persistence in taking necessary action to feel safe again, risk on purpose as needed, protectively interrupt in unsafe or potentially unsafe situations and observe the language of safety for ourselves and with others.

The Language of Safety, the seventh strategy in the PB process, has been described as the glue that holds the PB process together. It encourages us to be mindful of the ‘Quality’ of the language we use, ensuring that we have ‘Shared Meaning’, taking ‘Ownership’ of our language and maintaining ‘Clarity’ in our verbal and non-verbal communication.

In this way the PB process can increase our self-confidence and empower us to enhance our own thinking and problem solving skills. In turn this can increase our ability to take protective action on our own behalf, and seek the support of others when needed, to help us feel safe again. When we are feeling safe we are more likely to feel confident, strong and empowered, engage in adventures and live life to the full within a framework of safety.

Contact the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL)