Safeguarding
Safeguarding children and child protection applies to all children up to the age of 18. Safeguarding is the action taken to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm.
Should you have any safeguarding concerns, please contact the school (01600 775177), to speak to:
Mrs M Davies - Designated Safeguarding Officer
or
Mrs R Bailey - Designated Safeguarding Officer
or
Mr A Rodda - Assistant Safeguarding Officer
or
Mr J Owen - Assistant Safeguarding Officer
Safeguarding means:
- Protecting children from abuse and maltreatment
- Preventing harm to children’s health or development
- Ensuring children grow up with the provision of safe and effective care
- Taking action to enable all children and young people to have the best outcomes.
Child Protection
Child protection is part of the safeguarding process. It focusses on protecting individual children identified as suffering from, or likely to suffer, significant harm. This includes child protection procedures which detail how to respond to concerns about a child.
Safeguarding children is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone who comes into contact with children and families has a role to play. The purpose of our policy is to inform staff, parents, volunteers and governors about our school's responsibilities for safeguarding children and to enable everyone to have a clear understanding of how these responsibilities should be carried out.
We recognise that all adults, including temporary staff, volunteers and governors, have a full and active part to play in protecting children from harm and that the child’s welfare is our paramount concern. All staff members believe that our school should provide a caring, positive, safe and stimulating environment that promotes the social, physical and moral development of the individual child.
Our school will:
- Have safeguarding at the heart of everything we do.
- Maximise opportunities to teach our children / young people how to keep safe both in the real and virtual world.
- Support the child’s development in ways that will foster security, confidence and independence;
- Provide an environment in which children and young people feel safe, secure, valued, respected and confident.
- Ensure that ALL of our children / young people know a member of staff they can communicate with if they are worried about something.
- Where there is a safeguarding concern, governing bodies, proprietors and school or college leaders should ensure the child’s wishes and feelings are taken into account when determining what action to take and what services to provide. Systems should be in place for children to express their views and give feedback. Ultimately, all systems and processes should operate with the best interests of the child at heart.
Relationships and Behaviour
We aim for no less than becoming a world-class school, where all students make exceptional progress, contribute positively to their communities and develop a lifelong passion for learning. Our systematic and accessible Relationships and Behaviour Policy has a clear and consistent structure to ensure that students can learn without disruption. Good manners, respect and politeness matter, and the Policy propagates a culture of mutual respect within our community. Safeguarding and staff wellbeing are also integral within the purpose of this policy, with all practices and systems connected to these considerations.
Our Relationships and Behaviour policy is founded in our core values of Respect, Freedom with Responsibility, Independence, Security and Success. Through the application of our policy, we will also always maintain the discourse of the fundamental British Values of democracy, tolerance and celebration of diversity, personal freedom, equality of opportunity and rule of the law so that there is a focus on developing the whole child who is both principled and critical. Our students will take the values and philosophies with them when they leave MCS at the end of each day and when they leave us at the end of five years or, seven years.