Education Today Education Today Magazine
Staff in schools make safeguarding decisions every day, often with limited time and incomplete information. Vital details about students are often recorded across multiple systems for safeguarding, medical needs, behaviour and attendance. However, because these systems operate separately, there is a risk that important information could be missed.
To address this, VenturEd Solutions launched a new safeguarding framework at the Schools & Academies Show last week, at the NEC in Birmingham. The framework brings together safeguarding records held in CPOMS StudentSafe, alongside supporting data from Medical Tracker and SchoolPod, to help surface relevant information across systems so staff can identify important links sooner and act quickly when something doesn’t seem right.
In a busy school day, a class teacher might record a behaviour incident, a TA may log medication that a child needs to take, and the DSL might add a safeguarding note. On their own, none of these updates might be anything to note. But together, they could highlight a student who needs support.
For example, a student may be missing more school, be visiting the medical room more often with headaches or stomach aches and showing a change in behaviour such as becoming withdrawn or more anxious in class. Each of these could be easy to explain. But when you look at them all together, they could give safeguarding staff a clearer picture to step in early and help.
Ed Farmilo, former teacher and senior leader at VenturEd Solutions, said: “Safeguarding decisions are rarely based on one big incident. It’s usually small things that start to add up like a change in behaviour, more visits to the school office for medical advice or a student’s attendance starting to dip.
“The challenge is having the ability to spot those patterns early. Our aim is to make that easier for schools, so they can act sooner when something isn’t right.”
Daniel Neeld, managing director at Medical Tracker, said: “Schools have always held the pieces of the puzzle, but too often health sits in one system, safeguarding in another and behaviour somewhere else. By bringing Medical Tracker, CPOMS and VenturEd Solutions together in this framework, we’re giving schools the complete picture of every child, built from specialist tools that each do their job brilliantly. That’s how you move from reacting to concerns to getting ahead of them.”
Rick Gardner, managing director at CPOMS, added: “The new framework builds on systems schools already use. It doesn’t add extra workload or require staff to learn something new. It simply helps the systems share relevant information so safeguarding teams can see the full picture and respond more quickly.”
