The Elms School is committed to ensuring the safety and welfare of every pupil.

The staff and governors at The Elms School fully recognise that they have a duty to ensure arrangements are in place for safeguarding and promoting the wellbeing of children.  We adhere to the Local Authority’s Safeguarding Children Board Procedures and to Keeping Children Safe in education (KCSIE). We adopt the principle that ‘it could happen here’ at The Elms.  Please help us by becoming a part of our vigilant team whilst on our school site. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility.

The Elms safeguarding strategy is centred on the current context of the school and as a small independent school in this context, a strategy of annual external review by an expert safeguarding consultancy was adopted from October 2023. From these reviews, the school generates a clarity and focus on its strengths and areas for development, delivered through its Safeguarding Action Plan. The safeguarding structure at The Elms draws from the importance placed on the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) and the Deputy Designated Safeguarding Leads (DDSL) roles in KCSIE, as well as factoring in the structure and lines of communication within the school’s leadership and governance teams. The strength in strategy, utilising the annual consultancy body, ensures that the first stage of our safeguarding system – policy – is constantly in focus and works toward best practice. The school has strong, current evidence of the effective use of policy.

Staff allocated to direct safeguarding roles at The Elms have a combination of expertise, supported by quality training, and capacity within their roles to execute their function as individuals and as a team. Online safety leadership is delegated where specialist knowledge, specifically in the realms of filtering and monitoring, exists.

The Elms Safeguarding style, or ‘culture’ as we prefer to refer to it, is centred on a few core elements:

• Shared responsibility
• Vigilance
• Outward-facing and reflective
• Bottom-up – driven by and with the child’s lived experience and voice

If you are concerned about the safety of any child in our school, you must report this to one of the Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL). If you are concerned about the conduct of a member of staff or volunteer in our school you must contact the Headmaster. In the absence of the Headmaster, the Deputy Head Pastoral or Deputy Head Academic must be contacted.

Visitor Procedures

• Visitors must sign in at reception.
• Visitor lanyards must be worn and visible at all times whilst on the school site.
• Visitors wearing a red lanyard MUST remain under the supervision of a designated member of staff whilst on site.
• All visitors must sign out and return their visitor lanyard at reception before leaving the site.
• Please wait in reception until a member of staff escorts you to where you need to be.

Visitors wishing to speak to a particular member of staff should telephone the school to make an appointment, wherever possible.