Safeguarding Ethos at Walkley Primary School
At Walkley we see safeguarding and pastoral care as fully interlinked. Nurturing the wellbeing of ourselves and others is one of the key elements in our school vision. Making sure that everyone in our school community is safe is a crucial part of achieving this. At Walkley Primary school we have a designated Pastoral and Safeguarding Team but also regard seeking to identify and overcome all barriers to learning as a whole school responsibility and part of the partnership between school and families.
The Pastoral and Safeguarding Team work with children and families using a solution-focused approach. This means we seek to find ways forward with families that they can relate to and we can work in partnership to achieve.
Central to safeguarding and pastoral care is helping children understand their right to be safe. We embed the values of safeguarding throughout the school, this starts with the behaviour policy and runs through the curriculum where we offer learning and experiences that provide activities and opportunities to help our children to develop essential life skills and protective behaviours. This includes amongst others Relationships, Sex and Health Education (our citizenship curriculum), Mighty Minds groups, Social Skills groups for early years and KS2, online safety learning throughout school. This also includes encouraging children to take on roles that make a difference to the school community for example: school council, environmental wardens, junior parking wardens. We run NSPCC assemblies with all our children, promoting the message 'Speak Out, Stay Safe'.
The Pastoral Team and school as a whole strive to create positive working relationships with families. We ensure that all pupils and families who attend school feel that they will be listened to, supported and appropriate action will be taken.
For children, we use the well-being “Five- Point Scale” in each classroom to help all children recognise and acknowledge their feelings. This validates how the children are feeling and helps the classroom and pastoral team to respond to the wellbeing needs in their class.
Thoughts and feelings boxes are in every classroom. Children use these to express how they are feeling and share any issues. The Pastoral Team follow up any names in the box encouraging children to talk and think through their feelings. We use this as a learning opportunity to teach children how to recognise their feelings and find ways to manage and meet them. For children needing further more specialist support we offer ‘meet and greet’ sessions, or ongoing 1-1 sessions with a member of the pastoral team.
For parents we offer opportunities to talk to pastoral staff and address issues and seek advice. We are regularly at the school entrance and we will also hold drop-in sessions and parents can arrange one off or regular sessions.
We also establish close links and work in partnership with outside agencies and proactively seek to link children and families with this support. We organise “Team Around the Family” (TAF) and Multi Agency meetings and link with a wide range of services both for children and their parents.
We use a robust and secure recording system for any pastoral or safeguarding concern using the CPOMS system. This ensures consistency in recording across the school. We share information on a need to know basis to ensure the well-being of all children.
Policies related to Safeguarding can be viewed and/or downloaded from Safeguarding Sheffield Children website. These policies are updated regularly and used by Sheffield schools. Alternatively, you can download the full set of policies which we adopt below:
Safeguarding Policies and Procedures - September 2022
Walkley Primary's own policy and procedure information can be downloaded here: