Safeguarding is our number one priority within our organisation. We need to keep our customers safe, especially those who are vulnerable and at increased risk of abuse. These pages, along with our terms and conditions relating to safeguarding, help define our culture of safeguarding and child protection. It is critical that all organisations who work with or come into contact with children should have policies and procedures that govern safeguarding and ensure the safety of children and vulnerable people regardless of their age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation or any other characteristic determined by the Equalities Act 2010; they all have a right to equal protection from harm. Our policies and procedures mean we are able to keep children and vulnerable people safe from adults and other children who may pose a risk of harm to them.
What is safeguarding and child protection?
Safeguarding is the wider actions and processes that we take to promote the welfare of children and vulnerable people and protect them from harm, this includes the protection from abuse and maltreatment, preventing harm to their health and to children’s development, ensuring children grow up with the provision of safe and effective care and taking action to enable all vulnerable people, especially children and young people, to have the best outcomes.
Child protection forms part of the actions and processes we undertake as part of safeguarding but it focuses on protecting individual children who are identified as victims of abuse, who are at risk of abuse or who are suffering or likely to suffer significant harm. Child protection also includes our specific protection procedures relating to children and, oftentimes, includes the protection of vulnerable people using our services as a whole and details how we will respond to concerns about a child.
Resources
These resources have been put together and developed with help from various sources of information and form the foundation principles in which our policies and procedures are set.
- Definitions and Signs of Abuse