Who is this template for?
This template is designed for the key leaders responsible for safeguarding in schools across Wales. It is an essential tool for the Headteacher, Senior Leadership Team (SLT), and Governors to ensure that safeguarding policies, attitudes, and practices are effective and meet all statutory requirements.
Why use this template?
This template provides a clear, comprehensive framework to ensure your school’s approach to safeguarding is rigorous, effective, and fully aligned with Estyn’s expectations.
- Bring Clarity and Focus: It breaks down the complexities of safeguarding into manageable components, helping you to systematically review every aspect of your provision and ensure it remains a constant priority.
- Ensure Full Compliance: The template is structured around Estyn's key guidance areas, ensuring you evaluate all critical aspects from staff training and recruitment to site security and online safety.
- Build a Strong Safeguarding Culture: It fosters a proactive and vigilant culture by prompting deep reflection on attitudes and practices, moving beyond simple compliance to embed safeguarding in everything you do.
- Drive Meaningful Improvement: The process moves beyond a simple audit to help you create a clear, actionable improvement plan, ensuring that any identified gaps are addressed promptly and effectively to keep all children safe.
- Strengthen Governor Oversight: It provides Governors with a clear and structured way to understand the school's safeguarding performance, enabling them to offer effective challenge and support to leadership.
- Build Confidence for Inspection: By systematically evaluating against Estyn's guidance, you can be confident that you understand your strengths and have a clear plan to address any areas for development, putting you in a strong position for inspection.
How does it work?
This template uses the intuitive, step-by-step iAbacus process to guide you from reflection to action. You will evaluate your school's performance across key safeguarding areas, making judgements against the following levels: Unsatisfactory, Adequate, Good, Excellent.
The key areas evaluated are:
- Developing Children's Understanding
- Identifying Abuse
- Supporting Victims
- Policies up to date
- Recruitment
- Training
- Challenging Behaviour
- Pupil Absence
- School Site Security
- Pupil Health and Safety
- Internet Safety
- Radicalisation & Extremism
- Governors
Gaining Strategic Insight
For a leader of a trust or federation, iAbacus provides an invaluable strategic overview. By using the 'Stack' feature to compare the 'Safeguarding' abacuses from each school, you can quickly gain a trust-wide perspective. This allows you to identify schools that may require targeted support, pinpoint successful strategies in high-performing schools that can be replicated across the group, and ensure a consistently high standard of safeguarding for all learners.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With a single click, your evaluation can be exported into a polished, visually compelling PDF report. This is ideal for sharing with Governors and Trustees at a board meeting, providing a concise, strategic overview that allows them to effectively challenge and support leadership. It is also a vital tool for the senior leadership team to identify how well the school is doing to keep children safe and to focus on key areas for improvement.
References / Source Material
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iAbacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
