Child Protection Training: How to Respond If a Young Person Confides in You
(Don't Promise to Keep a Secret!)
As a teacher or educator, one of the more difficult things to deal with is when a child or young person confides in you.
This can be especially difficult if what the child or young person is telling you in confidence directly affects their safety or the safety of another child. As impossible as it can sometimes seem to prepare for these situations, safeguarding and child protection training courses can help your staff develop a versatile set of skills to deal with such situations.
Depending on what the child or young person confides in you, different responses are appropriate. Giving the right response is crucial — not least because of your legal duties regarding child protection and safeguarding. Child protection and safeguarding training can help teach your staff how to respond in situations where children have confided in them about neglect and abuse.
Child Protection Training: Dealing With Child Neglect
A child or young person can be harmed emotionally or physically through the neglect of their basic needs. The impact of neglect on children can be severe and continues into adulthood in some cases. It’s crucial that if a child confides in you regarding neglect, you report it to the relevant authorities immediately. In most cases, this will involve you telling the senior management at your school, who will relay this information to the local council.
However, it’s fairly rare that a child will come forward and simply state that they’re being neglected at home. Child protection training gives an excellent insight into the kind of behaviour that children and young people might display if they’re experiencing neglect. What’s far more likely is that a child will tell you they’re hungry or afraid to go home. Other tell-tale signs can include children appearing to lose significant amounts of weight in a small amount of time, or displaying concern for younger siblings.
Physical Abuse: Use Safeguarding Training to Educate Your Employees on Reporting
Dealing with incidents of physical abuse can be one of the most difficult scenarios to deal with as a teacher or school staff member. However, putting your staff through a safeguarding training course can help them to prepare to deal with these challenging situations.
Much like with incidents of child neglect (the two are often very closely related), if a child confides in you that they’re experiencing physical abuse, it’s essential that you report this abuse immediately. Safeguarding training can introduce staff to the ways to start a difficult conversation should you need to, as well as methods of recording and reporting the information given to you, including passing it on to the designated individual within your organisation who is responsible for safeguarding.
Both safeguarding and child protection training include recognising which children and young people in your care might be at an increased risk of vulnerability. This is especially important when it comes to recognising tell-tale signs of abuse and neglect among your students. Not every student experiencing abuse or neglect is going to come forward and confide in you about it. That’s why it’s so important to also be able to recognise different symptoms of abuse and neglect among students, as well as how to report abuse that’s directly confided in you.
No matter the situation, it’s essential that you don’t tell the child or young person who has confided in you that you’ll keep it a secret for them. Swift, accurate reporting is absolutely crucial in handling cases of abuse and neglect. It is also a betrayal of trust and means a child might not confide any issues with you in the future. No matter how hard this might be, it actually negatively impacts the child or young person in question to keep their secret, as it delays reporting and intervention.
Fostering a Culture of Trust in Your School
By putting your staff through both a safeguarding and a child protection training course, you’re presenting your school as one that not only cares deeply about the young people in its care, but also one that’s at the forefront of good practice in both areas. Investing in these training courses fosters a culture of trust within your school in a variety of ways. Most importantly, students feel confident in you about experiences that they might be having. Parents will have increased faith in the ability of your staff and your school regarding child protection processes, happy in the knowledge that all staff have a solid understanding of what course of action to follow in incidents of neglect or abuse.
