Safeguarding

The Designated Safeguarding Lead is Mrs B Battersby

The Deputy Designated Safeguarding Leads are Mrs R Dean and Miss K Ehlen.

St Charles’ Catholic Academy is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

We have a number of policies and procedures in place that contribute to our safeguarding commitment, including our Child Protection Policy which can be viewed in the Policies section of our website, and which can be accessed below, along with guidance from the Department for Education on other safeguarding matters.

Sometimes we may need to share information and work in partnership with other agencies when there are concerns about a child’s welfare. We will ensure that our concerns about our pupils are discussed with his/her parents/carers first unless we have reason to believe that such a move would be contrary to the child’s welfare.

We actively support the Government’s Prevent Agenda to counter radicalism and extremism.

Operation Encompass is a unique Police and Education early intervention safeguarding partnership which ensures that a child/ young person’s school/ college is informed, prior to the start of the next school day, that there has been a domestic abuse, vulnerable child or missing incident to which the child or young person has been exposed, and which might then have an impact on them in school/ college the following day.

Each school is informed of all such incidents, not just those where an offence can be identified or those which are graded as high risk. The partnership recognises that all domestic abuse, vulnerable child and missing incidents can be harmful to children and young people.

This information will be shared throughout the year, including holidays and weekends. Information will only be shared with the school by the police where it is identified that a young person was present, witnessed or was involved.

A nominated member of staff, known as a Key Adult, has been trained to liaise with the police. At St Charles’ Catholic Academy our Key Adult is Mrs Dean. They will be able to use information that has been shared with them, in confidence, to ensure that the school makes provision for possible difficulties experienced by children or their families. The Key Adults will keep this information confidential and will only share it on a need-to-know basis, for instance, to teaching staff for the child or young person. It will not be shared with other school students.

This national initiative has been implemented across the whole of the Merseyside Police area. If you would like some more information about it, you can view it online at www.operationencompass.org 

We are keen to offer the best support possible for our pupils and a recent review of Operation Encompass showed that it is beneficial and supportive for all those involved

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) covers a wide range of resources including; web-based and mobile learning. It is also important to recognise the constant and fast paced development of ICT within our society as a whole. At St Charles’ Catholic Academy, we use ICT throughout all our subjects and encourage children to do the same at home. It is of vital importance that parents and children are aware of how to  use the Internet safely.

At St Charles’ Catholic Academy we understand the responsibility to educate our pupils in e-Safety issues; teaching them the appropriate behaviours and critical thinking to enable them to remain both safe and legal when using the internet and related technologies, in and beyond the environment of the classroom.

Read the advice from the NSPCC about keeping your children safe when they’re playing games online here.