At Bright Futures, we believe that safeguarding is not just a responsibility; it’s a commitment to creating a nurturing environment where everyone can thrive. Our safeguarding forum serves as the cornerstone of this commitment, bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to coordinate, evaluate, and drive improvements in every aspect of safeguarding within our care and education settings.
The purpose of the Bright Futures Safeguarding Forum is to co-ordinate, monitor, evaluate, challenge and drive improvement in all areas relating to the safeguarding of the children, adults and students in our care and education settings.
It brings together a group of people from our education and care settings to discuss areas relating to safeguarding and agree actions to support improvements. The forum meets every other month, and will cover topics such as policy and procedure, training, quality assurance and organisational learning.
It will also review any relevant sector reports, research or learning from serious case reviews to understand what learning and information is relevant for us and needs to be shared across the organisation.
The forum is also contributed to by the people supported by Bright Futures, and representatives from the school student council will attend, feeding back on their thoughts, work and areas they would like Bright Futures to look at and consider in safety and safeguarding.
The forum has produced some great organisational initiatives, most notably the safeguarding week, which has provided a whole organisation focus across an agreed week to look at all things safeguarding and which is supported by various internal and external training and learning opportunities both for our workforce and the people we support.
This is now very much an annual fixture in the Bright Futures event calendar. The safeguarding forum provides the space to exchange information, share and develop best practice, review policies and procedures and agree and develop new ways to ensure we have the robustness needed in our policy, procedures and behaviour to safeguard the people we support. Safeguarding is at the very heart of everything that we do at Bright Futures, but this won’t just ‘happen’. The forum is there as part of our multi layered and comprehensive commitment to safeguarding.
Good safeguarding cultures are made up of many components, they include all people within an organisation support reflection, learning and engagement and the forum is an important part of achieving this.
