Today, the CSA Centre published their latest resource: Implementing a Whole School Approach to Child Sexual Abuse, a framework developed to help early years providers, schools, colleges and other education settings strengthen and sustain their response to child sexual abuse.
Created in collaboration with a range of education settings over two academic years, the Whole School Approach framework offers clear, step-by-step guidance to support settings in building an effective, sustained approach to responding to child sexual abuse.
Education professionals are in a unique position to identify and respond to child sexual abuse. They see children every day, notice when something changes, and build relationships with students over many years that can help them feel safe enough to seek help. Evidence shows that when education settings are well equipped to respond to children who may have been or are being sexually abused, the effect can be transformative.
While Keeping Children Safe in Education sets out the statutory requirements for safeguarding, our framework supports schools to understand how to put this guidance into practice – translating guidance into practical actions.
With an estimated one in ten children sexually abused before the age of 16 in England and Wales, it is important that all education professionals feel confident responding to concerns of child sexual abuse. How well a setting responds to child sexual abuse depends not only on confident staff, but on the systems and structures around them. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility, and this resource helps embed this principle across an entire setting.
The Whole School Approach resource guides settings through an audit of their current response, supported by practical prompts, templates and additional guidance on emerging issues such as technology-assisted harmful sexual behaviour. Although responding to child sexual abuse can be challenging, teachers and school staff already possess many of the core skills needed to recognise concerns, communicate effectively with children and offer meaningful support.
The Whole School Framework is the first of our practice resources to launch in a new mobile-friendly web format, making evidence-based guidance on child sexual abuse more accessible than ever.
Read the Implementing a whole school approach to child sexual abuse guide on the CSA Centre website here: Whole school approach to child sexual abuse | CSA Centre
