Safeguarding Systems

Your Policy, Code and Essentials are all in place.
What’s next?

Child Safeguarding Self-Assessment

Your organisation is ready to complete a child safeguarding self-assessment.

Structured around the Australian National Principles of a Child Safe Organisation, the online Child Safeguarding Self-Assessment will guide your organisation through a critical examination of child safety practice. The assessment includes links to tools and best practice examples and provides a clear summary of your organisation’s child safeguarding strengths, gaps and risks.

Safeguarding Review

A Safeguarding Review provides an external evaluation
of your safeguarding systems, policy and practice.

Based on the Australian National Principles of a Child Safe Organisation and incorporating other relevant global minimum standards, the review provides a set of findings about strengths and gaps along with providing a set of action focused recommendations to support ongoing improvement.

The Review process includes a desktop review, stakeholder engagement, site visits and report submission.

What would children and young people say about safety in your organisation?

Our Review process engages with children, young people and their families
to explore how safe they feel within your organisation.

Child Safeguarding Improvement Plans

What to do with your findings and recommendations?

An improvement plan helps your organisation organise and implement findings and recommendations. Safeguarding Central provide suggested sequencing for implementation. Our approach to sequencing balances a range of often competing priorities, including:

  • The overall risk to children and therefore the urgency to act.

  • How mission critical the recommendation is. For example, there may be recommendations that are required to meet essential standards, there may be recommendations that will result in an organisation exceeding standards. The improvement plan will sequence essential elements first.

  • Logic. For example, the need to design a training before delivering training.

  • Dependencies. For example, strengthening the organisation’s capability to respond to child safety complaints before launching a complaints process.

  • Other reform work or priorities underway across the organisation.

Improvement Plans add depth to recommendations, expanding them into detailed step by step actions, with associated milestones. Where possible, the plan will also suggest roles that are responsible for oversight and approval over each action.