Safeguarding Newsletter
Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL)
Delyth Lynch Deputy Head (Safeguarding) Biology 07825 419190
Deputy DSL David Walker Deputy Head (Pastoral & Wellbeing) Physics 07717 765343
Deputy DSL Ed Venables Director of Admissions Economics 07766 168286
Senior Deputy DSL Jess Goves P&R teacher Former HM 01344 751774
Deputy DSL Gaby Moretti Chambers Operations Manager (Wellington Health & Fitness Club) 01344 444243
If you are concerned for a child’s welfare, health or safety or if you have
member of staff or member of the general public – please contact
A note from the DSL
Safeguarding has never been a hoop jumping, tick-box exercise at Wellington; the team is passionate about getting it right and ensuring everyone at Wellington understands it because all young people have a right to feel safe and live a fulfilled life. I have, in the past, been personally frustrated when inspection teams have become irrationally obsessed with the temperature of the water coming through a hot tap or why we would consider allowing 3rd form pupils into Crowthorne given our proximity to Broadmoor. The most recent inspection had a different feel; the team, rightly, explored in depth our safeguarding paperwork and looked to understand our decision making and response times around complex cases; they checked our training records and materials and went through the Single Central Register (SCR) line by line to ensure that our recruitment followed statutory guidance as well as our own internal policies. But, and - most importantly – they spoke to hundreds of pupils and dozens of staff to dig a little bit deeper into the underlying ‘feel’ of the College. Thank you for filling out the parental questionnaire – this also forms a part of the jigsaw
puzzle that the inspectors put together. I would still argue that you cannot really get beneath the skin of a school in 3 days and totally get to grips with what really is going on, but I will take the comment that one of the inspectors made afterwards: “There is a real culture of safeguarding at Wellington.” We still await the final judgment of the inspection team.
And now, life goes on. The day after the inspectors left we didn’t just stop “doing” safeguarding because no one was looking, abandon the SCR for a couple of weeks or put away policies in a filing cabinet until 2024. The moment that anyone becomes complacent around the area of safeguarding or takes their eye off the ball is exactly the time that standards slip and there have been several examples of schools passing their inspections with flying colours, only to hit the headlines a few weeks later with a story of leadership failure around a safeguarding issue. I have never made any apology for the fact that I refuse to settle for minimum standards in safeguarding. I am sure you would not allow your son or daughter to settle on getting a C grade when they were
concerns about the behaviour of any adult – parent, the Designated Safeguarding Lead or a Deputy immediately.capable of an A*, so why would this be any different in this vitally important area of every young person’s life?
So, whilst it is our policies and procedures which provide the necessary guidelines for how our community should behave with one another, we also have well embedded initiatives such as the College values, Values, Behaviours and Attitudes interviewing and our Values Guardians which all form part of creating and sustaining the culture of safeguarding. My question to you as parents is what sort of culture do you have at home?
What are your family values? Are they explicitly spoken about or a set of unspoken principles which have been passed down through generations. Family values guide your family to become the kind of people you want to be and provide clarity and structure around decision making; they are the essence of what shines through in any ‘teachable’ moment.
This edition of the newsletter throws a real spotlight on the College Values Guardians and their role whist also getting you to think about the parallels between what we do at the College and what you do at home. Our theme this year has been “Everyone is a Values Guardian”; would this ring true in your family?
Stay safe.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – Who are the College Values Guardians?
In 2016, a working party of staff was set up and they helped craft a Low-Level Concerns Policy (LLC) to assist the promotion of a safe environment where any concern by a member of staff can be raised. Wellington College are now considered trailblazers in this area; most schools only had to implement such a policy in September (as laid out in Keeping Children Safe in Education 2021) and have struggled to get staff to understand the reasons behind it.
To help the effective implementation of the policy, the College appointed and trained a group of individuals as “Values Guardians” (VGs). Initially the role of the VGs was to educate staff about raising low-level concerns and provide a safe space for all staff to speak freely about their own anxieties with regards to a concern and any potential worries they may have about an individual. As the culture has changed at Wellington, however, so has their remit and they are now responsible for being
a listening ear to staff, providing a bridge between all staff and the senior leadership and also inducting new staff. All those who now start work at Wellington have a Values Guardian buddy and a leaflet which lays out what the values look like in practice.
The VGs are trained to listen and support all staff and to acknowledge any concern regardless of how small it may seem.
By understanding others’ attitudes and behaviours, the VGs have really helped embed a safer culture and have enabled the creation of a safe space where staff feel comfortable talking about different matters that may be intervening in their professional activities (e.g. divorce, loss, illness, etc.). The College can then help and support the member of staff in line with our College values. Our VGs are supportive, non judgemental and helpful. The work of others is also recognised; Katy GranvilleChapman (Deputy Head, Teaching Staff Performance and Development) invites all
members of the community to nominate staff weekly who have displayed a particular College value, going above and beyond that which would normally be expected. The VG team follow this up with a card and a chocolate to say thank you.
Ultimately, all members of staff at Wellington are Values Guardians – we are all responsible for looking after ourselves and our colleagues.
Ana Romero, VG since 2017
WHAT’S GOING ON? An insight into the world of safeguarding at Welly (with a particular focus on our values)
Values of the term
Each half term, the Values Guardian team select a value to focus on and our lead Values Guardian, Gemma Nicholas, sends an email detailing what this value might look like and what it means. This term, the value chosen for the first half was ‘respect’. The final quote on the email was from Richard Branson: “Respect is how you treat everyone, not just those you want to impress.”
The Health & Fitness Club - new Values Guardians
The Health and Fitness club now have their very own Values Guardi ans. Tom Philpot, Svjetlana Dragicevic and Logan Cannon will join the team and work specifically down in the H+F club, so that each new starter there will also have a Values Buddy and that all staff working in WCE (as well as the members) can benefit from the work under taken by the group as well.
Farrer & Co webinar – Low Level Concerns and Values Guardians
Recently Gemma Nicholas represented the College by speaking at the top legal firm’s national webinar about the Values Guardians at Wellington College. Gemma writes, “Delyth outlined how the Values Guardian team came about and I then detailed what we do – this includes buddying with new staff and meeting them for a coffee, circulating a half termly values email and sending personalised cards (and chocolates!) to colleagues who receive values nominations for going above and beyond, plus having our very identifiable yellow lanyards. Most importantly though, is being an approachable, available and friendly face that others feel they can come to if they need to speak to someone. It is always bittersweet when some one comes to talk to me – whilst sad there are things happening that need reporting (and there always will be), it makes me so proud and happy to know we have a supportive network in place that staff (and pupils) can voice any worries and know that these will be dealt with accordingly. Alongside our inhouse work, a focus for next year will be to liaise with other institutions (mostly schools but also the NHS) to share best practise and see if this is a system they can mirror, or indeed, if there is anything that they do that we can learn from. It is so important that we are supporting our colleagues and making the school a safe and happy environment for our pupils, so if we can share ideas on how this can be done in other schools, we absolutely will. It is about a change in culture and urging people to let us know about anything that makes them feel uneasy – this can sometimes be part of a bigger picture, so I would urge anyone with a concern to voice it.”
Assembly
Last term, Paul Jennings wrote a brilliant assembly for the pupils explaining the role of the Values Guardians. Prompted to do this be cause of the many questions he was getting about his yellow lanyard it highlighted to pupils about how staff were willing to be vulnerable too and admit their mistakes. The assembly also explained that if there were behaviours by peers which needed noticing and calling out, it was important to do so; to ignore it was offering tacit approval and acceptance that unkindness was ok. When Paul found himself struck down by a stomach bug the day before the assembly, fellow Values Guardian Mike Denhart stepped in to deliver the assem bly…..a very real life example of the values in practice.
Values nomination box
Just after half term, a box will be placed in the V+A for staff to put their values nominations in. Nominations have traditionally been done weekly over email; Katy Granville-Chapman really wants to open up the opportunity for those who don’t sit regularly at a com puter to be given the chance to be nominate and also broaden those who are nominees. Look out for the box when you are next in the V+A and feel free to nominate a member of staff – you are a very important part of our community as well!
The Football Association the FA have also become very interested in our work on low level concerns and how to implement such a system in a large organisa tion. Delyth Lynch is visiting the FA in early June to speak to them about how it works in practice. Sue Ravenlaw, the FA’s Director of Safeguarding, is leading on this area in sport. It will be interesting to see what happens with other National Governing Bodies in this area.
Departmental visits
The Safeguarding team are now coming to the end of their visits with academic departments. Undertaken over the course of the year, Jess and Delyth have been speaking to departments about a variety of safeguarding issues which might be specific to a subject or group of individuals, running through scenarios and addressing any points which arose in the departmental audits undertaken earlier in the academic year. Every department receives a safeguarding mug as a parting gift…..Next year, the focus will shift to College staff depart ments and houses.
“Safeguarding curriculum”
Jess Goves has spent the year looking at the overall provision for educating young people at Wellington in safeguarding – not just on the obvious topics such as online safety, but also how we widen the understanding of a typical Wellingtonian around issues such as FGM, exploitation and modern day slavery. It has been an extensive piece of work liaising with many HODs about what might already be cov ered within an academic curriculum and then marrying this up with the content covered within Well-being lessons and pastoral Head of Year talks and tutorials. Next year, the team will hope to implement the new programme and begin what will be a 5 year cycle of topics written uniquely for Wellington students.
consider the bigger picture. This is some thing that we should be mindful of all the time: what is the young person not telling us? How might we be more proactive in finding out the missing jigsaw puzzle pieces rather than remaining wilfully blind? Parents have a vital role to play here – if you feel that there is something that staff should know, please share it. No judgement will be made and we can respond in a supportive way.
Transition visits
Working alongside the Admissions Department, the two teams have been collaborating on how to gain more effective communication with our feeder schools, so that we can best help every student when they begin their Wellington journey. HMs and members of the safeguarding team are visiting schools throughout the summer term, meeting the young people coming to Wellington and finding out more about them to make their transition into the school as seamless as possible.
Rainbow laces
June is Pride month. This year the V&A will be selling rainbow laces. Please feel free to pop into the V&A and buy a pair! This year marks the 50th anniversary of Pride UK and in May, the Royal Mint revealed a new commemora tive 50p. This marks the first time in British history that the LGBTQ+ community has been celebrated on UK coinage.
Lower Sixth safeguarding talks
Every year the team visit all houses and speak to the new leadership teams in the houses about their role, the importance that they have in passing concerns on and where different the different thresholds for reporting lie. Since this training began in 2011, the tone and con tent of these talks have changed markedly. They used to very much be framed around punishments and educating the older students how to gain respect in a kind way. In 2022, these talks cannot be more different; the students want to know how to help, what sign posting they can do and the resources available and they speak open ly about how they want to be remembered – for the right reasons.
A culture of better practice: lessons learned
The safeguarding and pastoral teams have always met at the end of the academic year to review some of the significant cases and establish where procedures may have been weak or where better practice can be implemented for the future. In order to establish a real culture of learning within the safeguarding team, we now do this after every significant case, looking at the chronology of events and analysing decision making and actions taken. This mirrors the practice of other safeguarding partnerships in the UK and larger national re views are carried out by the Safeguarding Practice Review panel. The latest review published looked at the cases of Arthur Labinjo Hughes and Star Hobson. You can read it here
One of the key findings from the report is that in order for profes sionals to make good decisions about children, they need to have a full picture of what is happening in a child’s life and that everyone involved should actively seek out missing information in order to
The work of Nicki Ryan, our new LGBTQ+ ad visor has really been welcomed by the students. Nicki also spoke in the special Pride assembly on the 6th June about her work and what she is hope to achieve with our LGBTQ+ society. Nicki is also keen to work with parents. If you wish to contact her, please do email her on: nickiryan@external.wellingtoncollege.org.uk
Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2022 and the new National Minimum Standards (NMS) for Boarding
The new statutory guidance from the DfE which governs what we do as a school (and a boarding school) was published in May and will come into force in September. As expected the NMS have under gone a substantial overhaul and Dave Walker has already begun work on ensuring that we carrying out everything needed. KCSIE has only had some minor amendments (following a significant overhaul in 2021). The most significant change is the rewording of ‘peer on peer’ abuse to ‘child on child’ abuse. Both documents can be see here (NMS, KCSIE) if you are interested in reading them.
FINALLY...
We are delighted that Tom Wayman will be joining the safeguarding team from September when he moves into his role as Assistant Head – Pupils. Tom, who as part of his role will be assisting Cress Henderson with discipline, will provide the vital link between disci pline cases and safeguarding. It will come as no surprise that every discipline case this year has had some sort of safeguarding / pastoral element to it and it is really important that we look behind behav iours in order to ascertain what might be going on for that young person as well as support both victims and perpetrators in any inci dents. Tom completed his level 3 training last year and his experience and expertise as an HM and working closely with the HM body will be invaluable.
