Because we all share a responsibility for protecting citizen’s health, wellbeing, and human rights; enabling them to live free from harm, abuse, and neglect.
Whether or not you are working with vulnerable adults, or with children and young people, all organisations are responsible for ensuring that their staff and volunteers know how to keep people safe from harm, and that any concerns are raised and handled properly.
Yes, if your organisation has any contact with children and young people or adults who are vulnerable, you must have these in place. There is specific legislation in each UK nation about what this should consist of. Schools, colleges and learning settings, health and social care settings all have specific regulations about what applies to them.
Some organisations and settings are subject to external inspection of their safeguarding, such as by OFSTED or the CQC (Care Quality Commission) in England.
The Charity Commission in England and Wales is clear that safeguarding should be a governance priority for every charity; and that it is Trustees who are responsible for ensuring not only people who come into contact with the charity, but staff and volunteers too who are to be protected. If something goes wrong, it is Trustees who the Commission holds to account.
It can refer concerns about a charity’s safeguarding to relevant safeguarding agencies and regulatory bodies. Very similar requirements also apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Many organisations give the lead responsibility for safeguarding to a named person on the Board. But all board members still need to be trained and up to speed about what safeguarding is and checking that safeguarding measures are working effectively in the organisation.
Safeguarding incidents should be monitored, and the Board should get regular update reports about them, including about how they were investigated, and what actions were taken to put things right to prevent reoccurrence.
If your organisation or group employs staff and/or involves volunteers on more than just a one-off basis, you begin with having safe recruitment practices, and then having effective induction and training that covers safeguarding. You make sure that everybody reads and understands your safeguarding policy and procedures; and that they know who to report any concerns to.
If you have premises, you can display notices and posters letting everybody using the premises know that safeguarding is a priority for you and any breaches will not be tolerated. You can also set up an annual schedule for your policies and procedures to be looked at by the Board to ensure they are kept up to date. Any funding applications you make will ask for your Safeguarding Policy and will expect it to be up to date.
Download a Safeguarding Policy Template HERE.
The range of things that can constitute safeguarding risks and how to identify signs they might be taking place are more than we can cover here. They vary from online abuse to physical and virtual bullying; from grooming and coercion to sexting; A safeguarding issue or concern is anything that might impact on people's safety and welfare, cause them harm, or put them at risk of harm.
There are a huge amount of websites covering ‘safeguarding’ and it can a time consuming and frustrating minefield to navigate. We have done the groundwork and identified the following websites to access more details and available training, e-learning, from following the links to these resources:
Charity Commission for England and Wales: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/safeguarding-for-charities-and-trustees https://www.gov.uk/guidance/safeguarding-duties-for-charity-trustees
Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator
Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
National Council for Voluntary Organisations: Safeguarding for Trustees
Safeguarding vulnerable adults: Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)
Age UK – Factsheet 78 Safeguarding Older People from abuse and neglect
Safeguarding children and young people: NSPCC Learning: https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/training/safeguarding-charity-trustees https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/safeguarding-child-protection/voluntary-community-groups
Department for Education. ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children.’
This may seem a dry and technical topic, and one which is certain to generate little excitement.
Yet there is much confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between an output and an outcome.
This matters; because bids and applications to funders – and consequently the reports to them showing how their money was spent- heavily depend on knowing what your organisation or group has achieved.
Being able to demonstrate outputs and outcomes to your beneficiaries, your supporters, the public, your partner organisations, or people you need to influence about the value of your organisations work, are all helped if you clearly show what the impact is of the work you do.
The difference between outputs and outcomes is not just one of semantics.
Outputs are usually the tangible and direct results of a process, activity, or task. They should be able to be directly measured and quantified, either in terms of their quantity (how many) or their quality (what it was like), or both.
An output is likely to be a service, activity, or goods that you produce as an organisation. For example, running training activities, producing a newsletter. Planting trees. Running an older person’s befriending service. Or recycling second hand items for distribution or resale. These can all be measured in terms of the numbers taking part in them; or the frequency of them; or the numbers of people served by the activity.
Outcomes are on timescales which are short-term, intermediate, and longer term. Outcome expectations will be different depending upon which of these time frames any changes might be seen and evidenced. So, they will be the lasting effects of a process and the proof that the outputs have contributed toward some kind of change.
Outcomes may also be much more difficult than outputs to observe, to measure and to record, so thinking about ways of capturing and recording the outcomes you intend to achieve is well worth considering right from the outset. If its going to be excessively complicated, time consuming, or costly to capture your outcomes, it is likely to be worth modifying them or making them less ambitious at the design stage of your project.
Taking the older people befriending project example, it is clearly going to be easier to run a survey of people who were befriended to get a measure for an outcome about the project successfully reducing their isolation and loneliness, than trying to measure an outcome about the project ‘s effect on extending people’s lives.
Sometimes, outcome selection may be straightforward because the objectives of a project are easily quantifiable. But if it is not straightforward to find a meaningful or measurable outcome, it can be acceptable to ask what success looks like for the project; and whether any objective measures of this success are available already from existing data.
National Council for Voluntary Organisations: Click HERE
Social Value Portal: Click HERE
MC, the Management Centre: Click HERE.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation: Click HERE.