Safeguarding standards - self-assessment guidance

Bracknell Forest Safeguarding Board (BFSB) works to promote safeguarding standards across a wide range of organisations operating within the borough. As part of this approach, we work with partner organisations help ensure they understand their shared responsibilities for safeguarding children and young people.

In addition, we provide tools to support partner’s undertaking self-assessments of their compliance with requirements set out in legislation and statutory guidance.

The Bracknell Forest Self-Assessment Safeguarding Tool is designed to help all organisations reflect on how robust their arrangements are for a range of safeguarding scenarios that broadly fall within the following four areas:

1.  Their recruitment, training and supervision/support of staff/volunteers.
2. Their development of safeguarding procedures that are routinely reviewed/revised.
3. Their leadership and the quality of the governance provided by senior managers/trustees.
4. Their ability to work collaboratively and know how and when to share information.

Guidance 'Too Important to Get Wrong' has been produced to accompany the tool.

Following the completion of their self-assessments, partners are requested to notify the Board and to share copies of the documents used. BFSB recognises that some partner organisations may wish to continue to use their existing tools as an alternative to the format suggested above and would request that copies of these are also shared with the Board in order that it can be assured of the safeguarding arrangements that partners have in place. These documents will be stored securely in line with GDPR requirements.

As part of these local multi-agency quality assurance activities, BFSB will seek to involve partner organisations in its programme of continuous improvement. Overseen by a multi-agency panel, a sample of partner agencies self-assessments are selected for consideration, with the authors of these documents invited to present an overview of their organisations arrangements, including details of good practice and any actions required to support further improvements.