What are the National Safeguarding Standards?
The Church of England has been developing a set of National Safeguarding Standards since 2020.
The five standards are:
- Culture, Leadership and Capacity: Church bodies have safe and healthy cultures, effective leadership, resourcing and scrutiny arrangements necessary to deliver high-quality safeguarding practices and outcomes.
- Prevention: Church bodies have in place a planned range of measures which together are effective in preventing abuse in their context.
- Recognising, Assessing and Managing Risk: Risk assessments, safety plans and associated processes are of a high quality and result in positive outcomes. The assessment and management of risk is underpinned by effective partnership working.
- Victims and Survivors: Victims and survivors experience the timeliness and quality of Church bodies' responses to disclosures, and their subsequent support, as positively meeting their needs, including their search for justice and helping their healing process.
- Learning, Supervision and Support: All those engaged in safeguarding-related activity in Church bodies receive the type and level of learning, professional development, support and supervision necessary to respond to safeguarding situations, victims and survivors, and respondents, effectively.
As part of the development process, the Church of England launched a national consultation about the National Safeguarding Standards in April 2023. The standards were then revised in response to the feedback received from parishes, cathedrals, dioceses, victims and survivors.
The approved version of the National Safeguarding Standards can be downloaded here.
Integration with Safeguarding Dashboards
The consultation feedback, especially from parishes, welcomed the integration of the National Standards with Safeguarding Dashboards.
During the integration process, existing dashboard lights will be re-grouped under five new headings of the National Safeguarding Standards.
The above screenshot illustrates what the Dashboard Overview
might look like in the future
It should be noted that the fundamentals of the dashboards will remain unchanged:
- Green lights bring reassurance that all is well, amber means that action is needed, and red means it’s urgent.
- Each light has a help box that points parishes to relevant guidance and resources.
- A Safeguarding Action Plan for each parish is available at the click of a button.
When will this happen?
The National Safeguarding Team are asking parishes to work on the new Safeguarding Standards over a three-year period.
Safeguarding Dashboards will help parishes to do this by clearly explaining what needs to be done, and providing links to relevant guidance and resources. We will start with the Prevention standard in 2024.