JAN WEBB: Welcome to course three, Leadership in Safeguarding in the International Aid Sector. I’m Jan Webb. I’m the academic lead for these safeguarding courses. The overall objective of the three courses has been to develop a certified, high-quality
safeguarding training package for those with responsibility in safeguarding who are working in the humanitarian and development context. This course is the third and final mass open online course, or MOOC, in a series of three, developed by The
Open University and funded by the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development office. This final course has been developed for those in leadership, governance, or management positions who have a joint responsibility in safeguarding.
Within this third and final online course, learners will undertake four blocks of learning, which can be completed over six weeks. This allows for a higher level of engagement and flexibility for those with busy schedules. The material will provide
an opportunity for critical reflection on personal leadership, skills, and styles, and an opportunity to share frameworks or tools with peers through online discussion, as well as webinars to support the development of advanced safeguarding practise.
It will facilitate a strengths-based approach to leadership and good governance in safeguarding. There are a variety of topics that you will cover within this course.
They include leadership skills in safeguarding, the importance of an organisational culture that is conducive to safeguarding, equality, diversity, and inclusion, EDI, which is important in promoting safeguarding. It will also cover reporting, responding
to, and investigating safeguarding concerns. And the course will help you to promote your personal and organisational accountability and learning. It will address what constitutes good governance and organisational oversight of safeguarding. In
this course, as we have done so with the other two courses, you will find lots of useful resources to support your learning.
There are case studies to bring issues to life, short videos to discuss with your fellow learners in the discussion forums, and you will hear directly from safeguarding leads about their experience of implementing safeguarding within their organisations.
There is also time for you to reflect on your learning and share with others what steps you are going to take, based on your learning. The course also includes three live webinars, where invited speakers will share their knowledge and expertise
in leading on how to keep people safe in workspaces, as well as in their operations, programmes, and activities globally. So please do join us for these webinars.
I wish you well on your journey to effective leadership in safeguarding, and I really hope you enjoy MOOC 3.
Watch the video above where Jan Webb, Lead Academic, welcomes you to this course and gives you an overview of its content and approach. Please note that the live webinars referred to in this video were recorded and are available on this course.
This third course explores the importance of leadership in safeguarding, both within and across organisations working in the development and humanitarian sectors. It has been designed for learners who have a responsibility for shaping and delivering the
vision and strategy of an organisation. This would include managers, senior managers, team leaders, Board members, and trustees in private, public or non-governmental organisations that work in the international or national aid sector.
It provides a mixture of theory, practical applications using case studies, and examples of good practice to support you to critically reflect on your role and responsibility as a leader.
Webinars
The learning material on the course is supported by three recorded webinars featuring a range of speakers in leadership positions.
Learning outcomes
This course has been developed for learners who are in managerial, leadership and governance positions in national and international organisations working with vulnerable communities.
On completion of the course, you will be able to:
Improve personalised approaches to safeguarding and embed evidence-based and culturally sensitive ways of working.
Critically reflect on personal leadership skills using different frameworks and tools to embed a safe organisational culture.
Develop learning on good practice on safer reporting and responding in order to improve accountability.
Implement good governance with a clear senior oversight of organisational safeguarding.
The outline of the course content is shown in the diagram below.
