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Keeping Children Safe

At Diamond Academy, we are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our young people.

Safeguarding is our highest priority at Diamond Academy and it is everyone’s responsibility within our school to ensure our pupils are happy, healthy, and safe. To achieve this, we ensure the continuous development and improvement of robust safeguarding processes and procedures that promote a culture of safeguarding within our staff and volunteers.

Our academy is an open and inclusive school, and aims to provide our pupils social, emotional and academic support. We want all of our pupils to be happy and safe in our school. We have a specialist team of mentors who are on hand at all times. We expect all our staff to undertake a full enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check.

We aim to meet the needs of all pupils. We work closely with the Local Authority, health professionals and community organisations to find the most appropriate and effective support for our pupils.

For further information, please see our Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy
If you have any concerns about a safeguarding issue, please use the contact details below.

Contacts

Kim Barker - Designated Safeguarding Lead & Parent Support Officer	01842 752387 KimBarker@diamondacademy.org.uk
Caroline Clarke - Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo)	01842 752387 CarolineClarke@diamondacademy.org.uk

Alternatively, if you are concerned about a child and want to speak to someone, contact the Norfolk County Council's Social Care Team on 0344 800 8020.

If you consider the incident to be an emergency, call 999.

If you see something or hear something that doesn’t feel right – say something.

What is Operation Encompass?

Operation Encompass is an initiative enhances communication between the police and schools where a child is at risk from domestic abuse.

The purpose of the information sharing is to ensure schools have more information to support safeguarding of children. By knowing that the child has had this experience, the school is in a better position to understand and be supportive of the child's needs and possible behaviours. Operation Encompass will complement existing safeguarding procedures.

This is a process used to inform schools when the police have attended an incident of domestic violence or abuse, where domestic abuse incidents have occurred in the homes of their pupils since the previous school day.

How will it work?

Police will share information with First Response who will phone the school between 8 and 8.30am and ask to speak with the Head teacher or a Designated Safeguarding Lead. The school will be informed simply that there was an incident and the name of the child. The First Response Children’s Duty (FRCD) Officer making the phone call will not be in a position to give more information at that point.

What is the school meant to do with this knowledge?

By knowing that the child has had this experience, the school is in a better position to be supportive and understanding of the child's needs and possible behaviours. The Head teacher or DSL will share this information on a need to know basis e.g. the form teacher. The initial approach is that the sharing of information should not, in itself, provoke a proactive response to individual children by the school, but informs the schools' response to any presenting behaviour. Some schools will have the staff and resources to reassure the child that they know. This can be a real relief to a child as it can give them a tacit permission to talk about how they feel and what has been happening to them. The key aim of this process, however, is to ensure that the child is offered sensitivity and understanding following a distressing incident.

PANTS - NSPCC

As part of our safeguarding duty we understand that we need to teach the children about being safe and looking after their bodies when they are not with us. With this in mind we are using guidance from NSPCC and using their very catchy pants song.

So what does PANTS stand for?

P - Privates are private

A - Always remember your body belongs to you

N - No means no

T - Talk about secrets that upset you

S - Speak up someone can help

The song will be used in the setting to help us teach your child about what parts of their bodies need to be kept private and most importantly what to do if they are worried about how someone has touched them.

We understand that as parents this is a tough topic to be teaching such small children but this is why we are using the NSPCC guidance to make sure we get it right. We feel that it is so important that children learn these rules from a young age and early education is the key.

The pants song linked below is a fun, friendly approach but educational for children:

Watch the PANTS song video