Local Government and Local Safeguarding Board

1.1 Outline current legislation, guidelines, policies and procedure within own UK Home Nation affecting the safeguarding of children and young people.

Children Act 2006 – Is an Act that defines the new duties imposed on the Local Authorities in respect to improving the Every Child Matters outcomes for pre-school children. The Act also defines new rules in relation to childcare for working parents as well as parental information services. It is aimed at improving the well-being of young children. It emphasises the importance of safeguarding children and young people within an educational setting. If a child discloses neglect or abuse; an establishment should have instructions to help the child. This could be referral to an outside organisation or internally.

Law and guidance regulate the way you should work with children in your childcare setting to support and encourage their well-being and safeguard them from abuse and maltreatment. Legislation provides a comprehensive instruction on what must be attained in respect to child protection and safeguarding. Whereas Legal guidance is more precise and provides details on how the law ought to be applied and fulfilled in early years settings and services. Laws and statutory regulation are compulsory and should reinforce policies and procedures that are used in your setting.

There are many policies and procedures within the UK that outline the current legislation and guidelines to help with safeguarding children and young people.

As all staff and parents must be aware of these policies, you will often find them on a notice board, or in the settings brochure. It is also important that new staff are informed of these

It is everybody’s responsibility to safeguard children – This means every single staff member within a setting; irrelevant of what role they may have there. This also includes non-staff members, such as volunteers, student’s third-party companies (visitors, service providers etc). Each setting should therefore adopt their own safeguarding policy, of which has to be kept up to date and followed at all times.

The children act 1989 has influenced some settings by bringing together several sets of guidance and provided the foundation for many of the standards practitioners sustain and maintain when working with children. The act requires that settings work together in the best interests of the child and form partnerships with parents or carers. It requires settings to have appropriate adult to child ratios and policies and procedures on child protection. This act has had an influence in all areas of practice from planning a curriculum and record keeping. The every child matters framework has

Any childcare setting should have clear policies and procedures that cover all aspects of safeguarding. This should include policies and procedures for:

A significant element of a practitioner’s role in protecting themselves would be to read policies and procedures that are put in place to safeguard them and children or young people in their care. In a care setting a professional can protect themselves by:

Today we use the term safeguarding instead of child protection because it covers a much broader range. These changes were influenced by the first Joint Chief Inspectors’ safeguarding report 2002 and formalised in the Every Child Matters legislation outlined in the Children Act 2004. By safeguarding a child or young person we ensure they get the very best of the opportunities available to them for them to achieve the best of their potential while keeping them safe from bullying, crime, accidents, neglect and abuse.

Risk assessments should be carried out regularly to make sure that there are no safe guard threats towards the children in the setting. Childcare settings need risk assessing for example is there entrances and exits to the building that an unauthorised person could use? Could a child leave the setting without anyone noticing? Could a child get seriously hurt due to a broken piece of equipment?

To be able to safeguard children effectively we need to be aware of the following policies:

All people working with children are governed by legislation that is in place to protect your children and the child care provider. In this document I have listed four important legislations that are of particular importance to home based child care providers and noted how I aim to incorporate them into my practice. Child care practitioners also have a regulatory body; in England it is Ofsted. This document gives you a brief description of their supervisory role in child care settings. However, the list of legislation is not comprehensive and nor is the short description of Ofsted’s Role, if you would like more information or would like to discuss

This essay will attempt to critically examine the importance of interagency working in the safeguarding and protection of children and young people in the UK. It will consider both the challenges and how these have or might be overcome. It will look at key government legislation in respect to child welfare and pay particular note to high profile cased where interagency working has appeared to be less that effective in maintaining safeguards for vulnerable children, in particular. Consideration will be given to models of working that support interagency collaboration and of how some of these models may have been implemented in current

Here are some of the National, local guidelines and policies and procedures for safeguarding that affect day-to-day work with in our nursery. In the following ways: