Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

RISK ASSESSMENTS | AUDITS | HOME VISITS School improvement advice for headteachers and SLT THIS WAY! Hannah Carter examines what leaders’ priorities should be when it comes to safeguarding – from health and safety in school, to visits home... A fter 15 years in school leadership, there’s one truth I can’t escape. It sits withme, long after the building is empty and the emails have stopped for the day, and it’s this – schools are risk factories . Fromhealth and safety assessments inside school to the decisions made during home visits, school leaders are expected to manage an environment in which nothing must go wrong . Ever. Our professional duty, as set out in law and policy, demands no less than the absolute safety of every child. So we build systems. We write policies. We complete risk assessments and promptly review them again. And even then, every single day, safeguarding remains not a matter of certainty, but probability. To be clear, we’re not ‘eliminating risk’. What we’re actually doing is managing the unmanageable, because risk isn’t some fixed enemy we can defeat once and for all. ‘Risk’ is the endlessly shifting ground we stand upon, with leadership being a matter of deciding which risks must be addressed immediately, and which can be briefly tolerated while we decide how to act. 1. Static risks versus real risks Leaders are trained in identifying hazards. Wet floors, fire exits, unlocked gates, faulty fencing – these are all familiar, plainly visible and reassuringly solvable hazards. Health and safety assessments will often tend to focus heavily on static risks, yet the most serious safeguarding ones will rarely be contained neatly inside a form. The real danger lies in dynamic risk – those things that change hour by hour. The pupil who appeared settled in Period 2, but is now sending out worrying messages by lunchtime. The parent who ends a phone call calmly and then waits outside in the car park. The staffing gap that coincides with a distressed child. I remember arriving at work one Monday morning before 9am and finding three ‘urgent issues’ onmy desk. One was a safeguarding concern that involved a child’s unexplained bruising. The second was a report of total boiler failure (during winter). And then there was the governor demanding that I immediately return their call about the wearing of school uniforms. Which was the biggest safeguarding risk? The bruising, obviously. But – if the school’s heating did, in fact, suddenly switch off and then stay off, hundreds of pupils would need to be sent home, with their supervision shifting to environments we knowmay be less safe than those in school. This is the reality of leadership. Health and safety assessments capture hazards, but safeguarding requires leaders to constantly reassess risk in context. What matters most isn’t whether you completed the form or not, but that you noticed when the risk changed . 2.Tick-box training and its limits Safeguarding training rightly focuses on identification. Spot the signs. Record the concern. Report it. That all matters, but it’s just the start. Identifying a concern is perhaps 10% of the challenge. The remaining 90% revolves around what happens next. Do you contact social care immediately or speak to the parent first to gather more information – while knowing that simply by doing so, you risk alerting them? The police say they can’t attend within the next two hours. The child is distressed. What’s your risk tolerance during that window? Training rarely prepares leaders directly for suchmoments. Instead, it provides attendees with flowcharts and templates. But these will usually be designed with orderly situations inmind The impossible EQUATION 43 teachwire.net/secondary S A F E G U A R D I N G