Special Interest Group Launch Event: Education
The opportunity to reflect upon the current experience of colleagues in being delegated as the “lead” service in safeguarding, but NOT the legally defined fourth partner.
Christine Freestone has a broad experience of education, social care and health settings including as a Head Teacher and safeguarding lead. She has been an inspector and compliance manager and understands the vital role of front-line processes in education settings in keeping children safe and supporting staff in doing so.
Christine Freestone has a broad experience of education and social care. She is former head teacher, inspector, nurse, and senior leader for children in care with a particular passion for working with SEND. Chris works alongside leaders in supporting them to work within the legal frameworks, always with the child at the centre.
She understands the vital role of front-line processes in education settings in keeping children safe and supporting staff in doing so. Her style is one of supporting reflective practice and practitioner/leadership development.
Nicola O’Brien is the Director of Safeguarding and Designated Safeguarding Lead at an independent boarding school for ages 4-18. As a languages teacher for 30 years and housemistress of 62 teenage girls for 8 years, she became passionate about supporting children and young people through their adolescence. Realising that the DSL role was unique, important, yet often attached to other job descriptions, she began a DSL Cluster group for colleagues in similar settings. She is an accredited Safer Recruitment Trainer and holds the NSPCC accreditation as a Safeguarding Trainer.
Samantha Lurock is a Safeguarding Consultant at Safeguarding Network and is a registered Social Worker. Prior to joining Safeguarding Network, she worked for over 12 years in statutory social work settings with children aged pre-birth to 18 years. She has extensive experience of providing both strategic and case-specific oversight and direction for child safeguarding matters relating to risk outside of the home, familial harm, child to child harm and harm from professionals who work with children. She has a passion for delivering accessible and supportive safeguarding learning to a wide variety of audiences including police, health and education colleagues.
I think Child Abuse Review has gone from strength to strength and is of a consistently high standard. We have held numerous events that have been inspiring and enabling, such as the most recent Congresses and the Trainer's conference and award ceremony, the seminars to disseminate lessons from Serious Case Reviews. As resources get ever tighter, professionals have fewer and fewer opportunities to come together to exchange ideas and to learn together. We move more and more into silos because of work pressures. This is not the way to keep children safe. Association of Child Protection Professionals is needed to bring people concerned about child protection together to learn, to think, to shape policy and practice and to disseminate research. No-one else does this.
