Safeguarding

Prevent Strategy

As part of Christ Church Academy's commitment to safeguarding and child protection we support the government’s Prevent Strategy, and take guidance from Teaching Approaches to help to build resilience to extremism. A parent leaflet is available below.

What is the Prevent Strategy?

The Prevent Strategy is a government strategy designed to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorist or extremist causes.

Many of the things we already do in school to help children become positive, happy members of society also contribute to the Prevent Strategy.

These include:

• Exploring other cultures and religions and promoting diversity
• Promoting the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils, as well as British values such as democracy
• Developing critical thinking skills and a strong, positive self-identity
• Challenging prejudices and racist comments
• We will also protect children from the risk of radicalisation, for example by using filters on the Internet to make sure they can’t access extremist and terrorist material, or by vetting visitors who come into school to work with pupils.

At Christ Church Academy, we build pupils’ resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values.

The statutory guidance refers to the importance of Prevent awareness training to equip staff to identify children at risk of being drawn into terrorism and to challenge extremist ideas. At our school all teaching and support staff have completed training.

Prevent Strategy Documents

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

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

This information will be shared throughout the year, including school holidays and the 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 in a domestic abuse incident.

A nominated member of staff, known as a Key Adult, has been trained to liaise with the police. At Christ Church Academy our Key Adults are Mrs Thorn (Principal) and Mrs Dawson (Assistant Principal). 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.

Operation Encompass was first introduced in Plymouth in February 2011, and has proved very effective in providing appropriate and timely support to young people affected by domestic abuse. This initiative has been implemented across the whole of the Staffordshire 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.