Safeguarding
Keeping children safe in churches is a high priority – there have been too many scandals that bring God’s church into disrepute, especially when churches have tried to keep things covered up.
There are two main aspects to keep children safe in Church. The first is making sure that people working with children and vulnerable adults are suitable – which we call ”safer recruiting”. The second is the handling of child protection incidents and concerns, which can include a child making a disclosure about abuse or neglect or an adult doing something they shouldn’t.
How you do safeguarding differs in different jurisdictions and you will need to get appropriate advice for what you need to do in your setting. In the UK the Christian organisation Thirty One Eight are the goto for safeguarding policies and procedures.
The Premium version of Church Admin has two ways to help with keeping children safe.
- Safer recruiting– this allows you to setup robust record keeping for recruiting people volunteers and staff who will be in contact with children and vulnerable adults
- Child Protection Incident report – this allows you to record concerns and how they are dealt with. Schools record “niggling doubts” that often build a picture that raise the level to a concern that needs reporting to the authorities.
Safer Recruitment
Safer recruiting procedures differ in the different countries that use the plugin, so this module has been made as flexible as possible.
In the UK – churches typically do at least three things while onboarding volunteers and staff
- Criminal records check – called a DBS, which allows charities to check whether someone has a statutory reason why they should not work with children
- References – getting two reference is sensible next step
- Onboarding interview – where the policies are gone through.
We also make sure our children’s team have all read our safeguarding policy every year and get them to do a quick quiz to prove it.
The Child Protection module has a safeguarding section that allows you to create safeguarding fields to record what has been done with each person involved. We have set up DBS certificate number and date received, two online references and then a field for each year to show the safeguarding quiz has been done.
The online reference safer recruiting field allows you to send out a request to fill in a reference form and stores the return form the referee securely.
Child Protection Incidents
This allows you to record Child Protection incidents and concerns, with actions taken and a full edit history for each item.
You can also add a report in form to the front end of the website for logged in users to register concerns.
When an incident is logged you Designated Safeguarding contact is emailed and if it is an emergency a push message sent for immediate checking.
Setting Up Safer Recruitment & Child Protection sections
Firstly this is all super-sensitive information stored securely.
You will want to limit access to these sections,
For safer recruitment which covers onboarding information for volunteers, our church has allowed the church administrator access to that section as well as the safeguarding team.
The child protection incidents section is much more sensitive and closely guarded so we have only allowed our Safeguarding Team and Trustees access to that.
Safeguarding Team
This team will be the people who review incidents and take appropriate actions.
Create a ministry especially for “Safeguarding” and add your safeguarding team. That will mean the team members get emails when a child protection incident is recorded.
Restricting Access
Then to set up access – Head to Church Admin> Settings > Permissions and put all the relevant people’s names in all the sections. The “Kidswork” option allows for safe recruitment and “Child Protection” allows access to the Child Protection Incidents.
Next for each of the ministries in your church that require Safer recruitment – you can edit or add those ministries and check “Safer recruitment required” – that will put the people in those ministries on the Safer recruitment checklist.