Key Constituent
Agencies
Education Leeds
2007/8
Education Leeds has a dedicated Child Protection team comprising one co-ordinator and three training & support officers. The team offers a range of training to school and Education Leeds staff and runs an advice and consultation telephone service. We monitor child protection practice in schools and contribute to Education Leeds’s school improvement monitoring programme. The team represents Education Leeds on the LSCB board, executive group, relevant subcommittees and all ASCGs.
Between April 2007 and March 2008 the team delivered over 1000 hours of training and consultation and trained around 5000 staff. This represents a significant increase in the number of people trained in recent years. The team has had contact with over 90% of Leeds schools over the past two years and now offers a wide range of courses for designated staff, head teachers, learning mentors and support staff. We recommend that all schools have some form of Child Protection training every three years and, thanks to the development of a new training database, have been able to reduce the number of schools not engaging in any child protection training to 8. In the Audit Commission Schools Survey 2007, respondents placed our team highest in relation to Leeds’ services to schools, and in the top quartile nationally.
The team has also worked at the preventive level of child protection, supporting the development of curriculum materials on domestic violence to support schools. Additionally, all schools have received materials relating to children with sexually harmful or inappropriate behaviour published in partnership with the AIM project in Manchester.
The Child Protection team continues to offer a wide range of training courses to school and Education Leeds staff. We also play a key role in the delivery of the LSCB training programme at all levels and plan to continue this throughout the forthcoming year.
In response to local need and national guidance, we deliver courses on the following discrete topics:-
- Safer Recruitment
- Child Protection & the links with Domestic Violence
- Child Protection and Children with Disabilities
- Working with children that self-harm
- Working with children with sexually harmful behaviour
- Working with Children & Young People at risk of Sexual Exploitation
- Internet Safety (sessions for staff and / or parents)

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