Free safeguarding assessment for regulators, local authorities or governing bodies

The challenges of managing organisational registries and ensuring proper safeguarding measures in less regulated sectors are significant. However, the potential consequences of inaction – including harm to vulnerable individuals and loss of public trust – necessitate proactive measures. Implementing structured registration systems, transparent databases, and consistent standards can significantly enhance safety and trust. While these measures may incur costs, they are essential for maintaining the integrity of services and protecting vulnerable
populations. Leadership in this area requires a commitment to
transparency, proactive protection, and continuous improvement of safeguarding practices.

Regulatory bodies across various sectors frequently encounter challenges related to ensuring compliance with safeguarding standards. This is a common concern shared by many entities responsible for maintaining safety and standards within their respective domains. These bodies bear the responsibility of ensuring adequate safeguarding provisions within their remit. However, they frequently lack efficient means to maintain visibility over these provisions. While building and implementing such a comprehensive system is a significant undertaking, its benefits in ensuring effective safeguarding oversight are substantial. By leveraging our automated system and requiring concrete evidence of compliance, regulatory bodies can significantly enhance their ability to maintain standards and ensure safety within their sectors, even with limited resources. Automated reports for each organisation and the status of their team members is a crucial tool, enabling you to ‘police’ that checks are done with limited resources on your part.

Encourage your organisations to keep records of staff training, including attendance registers, training materials, and evaluation forms. Our platform records all qualifications and training carried out by each individual. Quizzes are a great training aid as well as a way of measuring knowledge. If you create these resources and host them on your platform, you can provide your organisations some valuable tools but also data capture the results. Regularly updating and reviewing your quizzes keep them relevant and our team of consultant partners are more than happy to create these for you. Collecting anonymous feedback from staff about their training experiences, perceived knowledge, and confidence is an alternative to quizzes and you’ll most likely find engagement differs so combining both gives the best chance of getting an overall picture.

The safeguarding community faces a significant challenge in tracking individuals who work or volunteer across multiple organisations. This issue is well-recognised and widespread, affecting various sectors involved in working with vulnerable populations. Governing bodies increasingly recognise the importance of a collaborative, multi-organisational approach to safeguarding. However, they often lack the means to implement such a system effectively. The implementation of our centralised safeguarding database represents a significant step forward in addressing the complex challenges of cross-organisational safeguarding. By providing a comprehensive view of individuals' affiliations and credentials, Safeguard-Me can enhance safety, improve efficiency, and foster collaboration among various stakeholders in the safeguarding community. This approach aligns with the growing recognition of the need for a more interconnected and transparent safeguarding ecosystem.

A key reporting metric is the volume of concerns and incidents to measure the impact of your preventative measures but also your policies and procedures to make sure they’re handled appropriately. Case Management software is a relative new development in safeguarding and thus far use is limited. Whilst competition is positive, to ensure high standards, you either need all organisations to sign up to the same one or ensure these solutions to ‘talk’ to each other so that they interface with your database tracking system. You need to be alerted when a case is raised, who is involved, what checks were done beforehand and the outcome as a minimum. You can set guidelines but real confidence for you and your organisations is if these are actively reviewed and, crucially, reported to show your committed to safeguarding improvements and routing out individuals who are not appropriate. It may seem counter intuitive to report on cases as you will naturally fear it will damage your brand. But showing how you are proactively managing them, hopefully reducing them, actually delivers the opposite feeling. It also enables you to control the narrative, which will put you in favour with the media.

We regularly see a desire to access case history to be able to identify patterns of behaviour. Issues can sometimes be managed internally (and quietly) to ensure a quick resolution (and the wider brand isn’t impacted). The individual might even be banned from that organisation or sector only to ‘pop up’ in another. Unfortunately, as there is no centralised record to monitor this and if there are no police involved it won’t show on a DBS. This is why digital case management solutions are critical not only to track incidents but also data capture for future reference. There’s a huge assumption here though that all these solutions either talk to your database and/or each other. That is not an easy task to undertake and requires openness from the providers. This is something we actively strive to achieve with our platform; a Safeguard-Me Passport is notified when there is an incident, instantly linking their profile. This shows all the checks that were carried out and when but also links to all the organisations they work with, giving them the opportunity to suspend or restrict their activity if appropriate.

The first step is to adopt standardised data formats to ensure consistency and compatibility across your organisations. You can also create data dictionaries to define data elements and their meanings, reducing ambiguity and facilitating data exchange. Establishing secure, centralised platforms for sharing data isn’t easy as most governing bodies have created their own. There needs to be investment in API to enable matching of individuals to help track patterns of behaviour. If governing bodies retract insisting on their own BDS’s each time then that could potentially be used but the current policies regarding DBS make this more of a challenge. You will also need to develop clear data sharing agreements that outline the purpose, scope, and security measures including robust encryption and anonymization techniques to protect sensitive data. Such as adhering to relevant data protection laws and regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA.
Our platform uses bank level inscription and enables safe viewing of data as well as sharing. Users must agree to share their data with other organisations as well as umbrella governing bodies, which can be done during registration if you intended to use our database facility to track and monitor individuals, the other organisations they are working with and all their vetting checks.

A big concern for all governing bodies and regulators is that the correct and thorough checks are being carried out on individuals before they interact with those under their care. A DBS is one way but this is just a ‘point in time’ check and maybe out of date. So we understand why some bodies request a new one even if the individual already has one or several recent DBS reports. This isn’t infallible however, and when recruiting professional roles interviews and references are often also undertaken as well as checking qualifications. This isn’t the same standard for all roles though and when it comes to volunteers sometimes, we can be grateful for any support at all so checks can be ‘lax’. Knowing who is checked, to what standard and then how that is recorded, even in professional roles, has a wider disparity. Many records of safeguarding checks are kept in a spreadsheet and separate files for the documents. These are easily lost and can easily fall out of date. It also makes it hard to share the required data with a school, for example, when they attend another site or yourselves. There’s not set standard or format for reporting their status, which creates increased admin unless you have your own platform for these to be registered.

There are a number of ways you can conduct audits but no one solution fits all. Smaller organisations can be managed digitally but a larger organisation might need a more hands on approach. Digital solutions can still help simply and speed up the process but sometimes you need to be on-site to see it for yourself. Examining policies, procedures, risk assessments, and training records can be done from a desk. As can scrutinising incident reports to identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement. But you may want to directly observing staff interactions with service users, including communication, behaviour, and adherence to procedures. Conducting interviews to gather information on experiences, perceptions, and concerns and assessing the physical environment to identify any potential risks or hazards are other on-site options. Consider comparing practices across different organisations to identify best practices and areas for improvement. Analysing data on incidents, complaints, and other relevant metrics to identify trends and patterns over time.
Out consultant partners are able to support all of the above, to create the framework, train your team or conduct the audit themselves. They’re expertise can help you set the standard and simplify content for your organisations.

Possibly the hardest element for any governing body and choosing the correct KPIs to evidence your progression and improvements. Measuring people’s understanding is almost impossible unless you develop enforced testing. That can require significant development and potentially cost even if you do it yourself or subscribe to external online testing. Surveys are a cheaper option that can be sent out to your base and incentivisation helps boost take up. Implementation can also be monitored via surveys but assumes your base are honest, which is a challenge if they assume it’s an audit exercise. So how do you witness the evidence for yourself efficiently? Sharing a document repository or links to their policies hosted online are one way but incur significant admin time to oversee. A new feature from Patronus Safeguarding uses AI to scan documents to provide summaries. Whilst this example shows how it’s used for case management, it could also be used for policy and process documents. This could speed up reviewing and auditing your base and create your own records as evidence. Effectiveness will, hopefully, be measurable by the reduction in cases. However, be warned you may also suffer what is perceived as a spike but in reality, is simply more cases being recorded, which previously weren’t. If you show you’re being proactive and transparent you can control this narrative though and position the positives of have more sight and therefore improvements are constantly being made. The more you know, the more you learn and can improve.

Developing clear and concise safeguarding guidelines that are easy to understand and implement sounds simple but you’ll be surprised how over engineered they can be. Such as streamlining safeguarding processes to reduce bureaucracy and administrative burden. Mandatory and regular training ensures that all relevant staff receive the same standard and knowledge. We appreciate resources might be tight but if possible, offer dedicated support services, such as helplines and online resources, to assist you organisations. Platforms for sharing information between agencies and organisations enables transparency. Conduct regular inspections as outlined in our response to the audit barrier to assess compliance with your standards and monitor KPIs. Analyse the more serious incidents to identify lessons learned and implement improvements. Provide clear and concise guidance on the different types of DBS checks and when to use them. Our recommendation is to always get an enhanced DBS irrespective of the nature of the role. A belt and braces approach is always more robust. Finally, use tech, to help organizations and individuals understand the requirements and carry out the necessary checks on individuals. We hand hold organisations through the checks to help them ensure they do the right ones.