Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone who comes into contact with children and their families and carers has a role to play in safeguarding children. School staff are particularly important as they are in a position to identify concerns early and provide help for children to prevent concerns from escalating. All school and college staff have a responsibility to provide a safe environment in which children can learn. (Keeping Children Safe in Education, DfE, 2023)
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023
Working Together to Safeguard ChildrenRevised Prevent Duty Guidance for England and Wales
Teaching Online Safety in Schools
All teachers are recruited in accordance with safer employment procedures. Apricot Online maintains a Single Central Record, including enhanced DBS checks, reference checks, identity checks, and right to work evidence. All advertisements posted make reference to these checks in an effort to subvert inappropriate applications.
Mrs. Jodie Phillips – Designated Safeguarding Lead and Child Protection Officer
Ms. Amy Smith – Designated Safeguarding Lead
It is important to teach pupils about the underpinning knowledge and behaviours that can help pupils to navigate the online world safely. DFE, June 2019
Apricot offers the OSA Certificate of Online Safety for all students at KS3, KS4, and KS5 with age-appropriate content.
Schools across the country are turning to the OSA Certificate of Online Safety to enhance and measure pupil understanding in this important area. Enhance safeguarding and generate valuable data to share with governors and inspectors to evidence the quality of your provision.
The OSA Certificate of Online Safety is delivered online and can be completed in lessons or independently. All assessment is carried out online, with pupils able to progress at their own pace by taking tests when they feel ready.
All staff receive annual Child Protection and Safeguarding update training and are aware of the procedures for passing on concerns within school. If any members of the school or local community have concerns about the welfare of a child in their school, please pass them on to the school Child Protection Team.
On induction, our teachers receive safeguarding training with respect to our policies and procedures. Ongoing training consists of the following, as well as many refresher and update sessions. Here are just some of the topics we cover:
We also address Child Protection and Safeguarding at our annual Teacher Conference in September.
For child protection within lessons, both webcams and private chat among students are disabled. Live attendance is available through our learning platform. We log all reasons for non-attendance communicated to us by parents/responsible adult and Attendance Officers.
All lessons are recorded for safeguarding and child protection. All names are anonymised on recordings. All communication is through secure platform messaging and classroom audio, chat box, and whiteboard tools.
None of our classes are ever “in-filled” with students over the age of 18 years.
We have an up-to-date Data Protection policy and are in full compliance with GDPR.
Apricot’s internal QA cycle revolves around the structure of the academic year. Learning walks and formal lesson observations are held termly and judged against our criteria for best practice that extends beyond Ofsted’s expectations. These include skills specific to teaching effectively in the online environment and the personalisation of lessons for our vulnerable cohorts.
Read all about our QA external audits and what we've learned from them in these two blogs: Quality assured and Learning from QA audits
