3.7 Developing procedures
In Course 2, you may have identified some of the supporting procedures that are needed to implement your safeguarding policy and have begun to prioritise these. Once your policy has been approved, your focus will turn to developing or revising these procedures further – starting with your identified priorities.
This isn’t something that you should try to do on your own. You should get help from external experts and internal
Let’s use an example – developing guidance for taking children away to tournaments or training camps. Patience describes how she approached this task.
Activity: Patience develops guidance for away trips
As you read her account, make a list of the actions you need to include in your safeguarding Action Plan.
‘Our initial assessment identified that we had very little written guidance for staff responsible for taking groups of children away to competitions. We identified that trips are one of the highest risk situations we can put children in, and that without clear guidelines we were making children, staff, and the organisation, vulnerable.
‘As a first step, we needed to develop clear, practical guidance that identified and addressed all the main considerations when taking children away. We identified two staff members with experience of regularly taking child athletes away, to lead on this work.
‘We started by breaking a trip into its key parts. We came up with these:
- Pre-trip planning and preparation (staff).
- Pre-trip planning and preparation (athletes and parents).
- Having a Safeguarding Lead for the trip.
- Departure/return timetable and handovers.
- Travel arrangements.
- Welcome and induction (itinerary, codes of conduct, support available).
- Accommodation, refreshments, and meals.
- A process to report incidents and concerns.
- A process for managing and referring cases to authorities if needed.
- Missing person arrangements.
- Supervision by appropriate adults – at all points on the trip.
- Activities – competition, training, and free-time.
‘We then thought about each part in more detail. For example, pre-trip planning and preparation for staff:
- A full itinerary (including travel, activities, and down-time).
- Checking accommodation and other facilities.
- Planning for travel including gathering relevant regional security advice.
- Information from athletes/parents (consents, medical and dietary information, emergency contact details).
- Supervision arrangements throughout the trip.
- Considerations for athletes with additional needs (e.g. disabilities, special dietary needs, etc.).
- Travelling staff code of conduct – include rules about smoking and alcohol.
‘Pre-trip planning and preparation for athletes and parents:
- Itinerary.
- Consents, medical and dietary information, emergency contact details.
- Athletes’ code of conduct.
- Drop-off and collection arrangements.
- Rules on the use of technology and social media.
- Contact with child during the trip.
‘Finally, we pulled all the information together into easy guidance, for staff, parents/carers, and also for children in child-friendly language.’
Comment
You can see that when you start to think about how to put policy into practice, there are lots of things to consider. Make sure you involve staff and athletes in thinking this through, to help you come up with really effective procedures.
In the next section, you look at an important part of procedures – the code of conduct.
3.6 Reviewing other policies and procedures
