Record keeping best practice
How schools record and store safeguarding data can help build a picture and identify abuse and neglect. A whole school approach is needed to promote the welfare and safeguarding of children. It’s usually the accumulation of several incidents or observations that provide evidence of risks, so it’s vital that any concerns staff have for a student, however small, are formally recorded.
All staff must:
- Be alert and recognise abuse
- Be professionally curious
- Maintain an attitude; it could happen here
- Respond to abuse and the needs of the child
- Report abuse
- Record all relevant information
Recording systems should be easily accessible, and when recording, all staff should:
- Use clear, straightforward language and be concise
- Use the child words they used when disclosing
- Differentiate between facts and opinion
- Consider contextual safeguarding- record the location of concern
- Provide enough information so that decisions can be actioned
Information sharing helps ensure that an individual receives the right services at the right time and prevents a need from becoming more acute and challenging.
Triaging safeguarding concerns
Upon receipt of a safeguarding concern, the safeguarding lead will triage it by conducting an initial assessment, considering the risk, threshold, and progress while identifying actions to be taken and the degree of urgency required for each action.
Ask yourself, do you:
- Look back on a child’s chronology to understand the child’s history?
- Assign categories?
- Review concerns to see if the safeguarding culture in your school can be changed?
- Identify vulnerabilities that need to be flagged on your system?
- Review safeguarding concerns for accuracy and detail to plan staff training?
- Record decisions and the rationale for those decisions?
Case management
Having a clear approach to record keeping is very important and an integral part of your safeguarding practice. Records may be needed to prove what decisions were made and how they were made, and they will provide supporting evidence when escalating and making referrals to agencies.
Chronologies are vital and central to understanding concerns for a child in the context of history, timelines, and other known information.
One of the major factors behind effective safeguarding management is the ability to share relevant information securely and efficiently. Accurately logging everything from the beginning will help if it leads to child protection enquiries, a criminal case or even any type of review.
The benefits of good record-keeping and case management:
- Keep children safe
- Identify child protection or welfare concerns at an early stage
- Identify patterns of concerns and trends
- Record minor incidents to build a more complete picture of the lived experience of the child
- Monitoring of safeguarding practices, trends and compiling and analysing data
- Monitor decision-making and actions taken and provide evidence of actions taken
- Support risk assessment and planning
- Support working in partnership and agreed joint strategies with other agencies
- Enable informed and timely referrals
- Provide evidence to support professional challenge
- Demonstrate compliance at inspection or during audits
Introducing MyConcern, our safeguarding software for schools
MyConcern is a pivotal component in ensuring individuals are protected. It allows anyone responsible for the protection of students and adults at risk to easily record, report and manage all safeguarding, wellbeing, and pastoral concerns.
MyConcern helps to protect those at risk by allowing early intervention. It puts the child at the centre of all decisions and compiles a fully automated chronology and audit trail, ensuring that all relevant data is fully and accurately recorded. This means proactively identifying risks and trends before they escalate into more serious issues and safeguarding the child’s care and wellbeing so that they can reach their full potential.
For more information on recording and managing safeguarding concerns and how our safeguarding solution, MyConcern, can help, download our free guide to ensure you have the essential information you need to protect all your students.
