At St Joseph's Catholic Infant School the health, safety and well-being of every child is our paramount concern.

Our aim is for children to enjoy their time as pupils in this school. We want to work in partnership with you to help your child achieve their full potential and make a positive contribution.

To promote a safe environment for pupils, our selection and recruitment policy includes all checks on staff and regular volunteers’ suitability, including checks with the Disclosure and Barring Services, as recommended by Buckinghamshire Council in line with current legislation.

In accordance with our responsibilities under section 175/157 of the Education Act 2002, and “Keeping Children Safe in Education” 2024, we have a Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) for Child Protection (Mrs Ann Taylor - Headteacher) who is a member of the senior management team, and has received appropriate training for this role. It is their responsibility to ensure that all staff in contact with children receive child protection awareness training on a regular basis. We believe safeguarding and promoting our students welfare is everyone's responsibility, and we work together as a team to achieve this. We listen to our pupils and take seriously what they tell us. 

There are occasions when concern about a child may mean that we have to consult other agencies. Whilst we would always aim to work in partnership with parents, there may be exceptions to this when concerns are raised for the protection of a child.

On very rare occasions Social Care, whilst undertaking an investigation under s47 of the Children Act 1989, may want to speak to a child without parents’ knowledge. This decision would be made by the police and social care, we are required to work collaboratively with partner agencies and would therefore cooperate with direction given. This would however always only be done in situations where a child might be at immediate risk of harm. To gain consent at this point may increase the level of risk to the child or cause evidence of a crime to be lost.

We follow procedures laid down by the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board, and the St Thomas Catholic Academies Trust Safeguarding Children Policy and Child Protection Procedure. If you want to know more about the policy and procedures, please speak to the Headteacher, Mrs Ann Taylor. Please click on the following link for more information: 

https://www.stcat.co.uk/about-us/safeguarding/

For additional information, please visit the Buckinghamshire Safeguarding Children Partnership's website: 

https://www.buckssafeguarding.org.uk/childrenpartnership/

Reporting Harmful Content 

The RHC button is an asset of SWGfL, a charity working internationally to ensure all benefit from technology, free from harm.

The button has been developed to offer anyone living in the UK a simple and convenient mechanism for gaining access to reporting routes for commonly used social networking sites, gaming platforms, apps and streaming services alongside trusted online safety advice, help and support. It also provides access to an online mechanism for reporting online harm to the RHC service for those over the age of 13 where an intial report has been made to industry but no action has been taken. RHC will review content in line with a sites' community standards and act in a mediatory capacity where content goes against these.

Children under 13 years of age are encouraged to tell an adult that they trust about what has happened and to ask for their help in reporting this going through our how we can help resource together.

How we can help

RHC also have advice and links to reporting routes for other online harms people may come across or face, such as impersonation, privacy violations and intimate image abuse. 

The RHC button provides a gateway to the RHC reporting pages, an area of the RHC website offering: 

• links to reporting routes on commonly used sites for 8 types of online harm

• help, advice and support on what to do if experiencing or witnessing harm online

• signposting to industry partners reporting forms and the ability to reportlegal but harmful content directly to RHC for further investigation

Reporting to RHC

Reports can be made 24/7 through the online reporting forms and helpline practitioners will review and respond to reports  within 72 hours between 10am and 4pm Monday to Friday.

Reports can be made to RHC by anyone over the age of 13. SWGfL operates 3 helplines and to be sure you're getting the right support take a look at the Helpline flowchart to find out who can best support you.