School Safeguarding Audit

School/Setting Safeguarding (Section 175) Audit

Audit input

We have created an online safeguarding audit tool for the Gloucestershire School Safeguarding Board. If you feel it could be useful to you, please contact us on 01285 700759 or email us and we can arrange a demonstration.

We have adapted our survey, reporting and monitoring software to create a simple online tool for schools and settings to enter the audit of statutary duties and associated responsibilities in relation to 'Keeping Children Safe in Education'. This is a legal requirement under section 14B of the Children Act 2004 and every school and educational setting has to respond to the audit.

The audit is split into sections:

• Introduction - information relating to the statutary nature of the audit and any other general information/instructions required
• School/Setting details - such as DSL, deputy DSL, Governor names and training dates
• Audit questions - Levels attained (1 - 4) with input for evidence, plus any other questions related to the audit heading.
• Additional questions - Related questions can be put here such as number of referrals, concerns, early help assessments etc
• Compliance Checklist - A list of all that have to be in place to be compliant
• Action Plan - a template Action Plan for schools is provided with space to edit and store the plan for future reference.
• Resources - An area to link to all the useful documentation that is available to help schools/settings comply
• Help and Support

In addition to all the audit-related inputs (Levels 1 - 4 for each of 24 headings in the 2017/18 audit) other questions can be inserted within the audit section if required

The audit can be exported to Word page-by-page, section-by-section or as a full download if required.

Reporting the data

Once the schools/settings have completed the audit the report has to be prepared for the Safeguarding board by the County Safeguarding Children manager. This is where our Lodeseeker™ reporting software comes in. Unlike our OPS results, where there are multiple responses per school, the audit has a single response per school and the data is easily available via our filtering system. The full power of Lodeseeker™ is available to analyse responses and have data to hand ready to report to the Board.

Schools can also access their own audit inputs on Lodeseeker™. Data from previous years is also be available.

Monitoring progress

Our Monitor tool looks after distribution lists, access levels and passwords and also shows which schools are accessing the audit - or more importantly which schools are not accessing the audit- which makes chasing up a lot easier.

The audit:

A helpful compliance checklist: