Education Today Education Today Magazine
Whilst being advised by the Dept of Education, a brand new and potentially game-changing approach to safeguarding, called “The Hayley’s Course”, was trialled for the first time in an East London school in March. Taking a cultural approach to safeguarding, rather than the traditional legal approach, preliminary results from the Pilot shows that the children who participated overwhelmingly enjoyed the experience and felt it had significantly improved their awareness of safeguarding situations.
Half a million children suffer abuse in the UK every year. Last year’s Whyte Report into British gymnastics and Department of Education’s Pilot into Education in Outdoor Spaces made for sorry reading and highlighted the gross failures of current child safeguarding efforts in the UK. “The existing system is far too bureaucratic and unwieldy to execute”, says Yourlance Richards, creator of The Hayley’s Course. “Both perpetrators and children get too easily lost in bureaucracy, when what is really needed is straightforward action”.
Yourlance continues, “We know from the Whyte Report that the sad reality is children are still vulnerable and get abused far too regularly. While the current system means well, it’s clearly not fit for purpose in the 21st century”. Motivated by the facts, along with her own first-hand experience, Yourlance formed the company SELFguarding Ltd. She created the course and named it after Hayley McLean, a current member of both the GB indoor and outdoor athletics teams, who was unfortunate enough to suffer serious abuse in the athletics system as a teenager. “Even when a young person decides to speak up and does everything correctly, the system too often fails them because its focus is on the integrity of the bureaucracy, not the people within it” continues Yourlance.
Using a combination of online videos, online interactive questions, audio text and guided classroom learning, The Hayley’s Course gives participants the competencies to identify what a sporting session & coach should be (according to UKA standards), along with how to identify issues, shortcomings, and potential signs of negative and potentially harmful environments. “We have created a blueprint for a new way to address safeguarding issues, where young people (and adults) can be taught to take responsibility for their own safety – hence the name SELFguarding. This is about getting kids and responsible adults to help themselves and to look after each other BEFORE something happens”, Yourlance explains, “SELFguarding can be the new NO”.
“Representatives from the Dept of Education attended the pilot and loved the concept” confirms Yourlance. “We are working closely with them on how to get this into every school”.
SELFguarding has been launched in the context of no less than 15 UK Acts of Parliament currently dealing with child safeguarding. These Acts require key organisations, such as local authorities and the NHS, to create their own safeguarding planning and processes relating to children. This is usually achieved with little to nothing in the way of standardisation, consistency and quality control. There is currently no legal compulsion for any other organisation, such as Scouts or Sports Clubs to do the same – only guidelines. How many times do we have to keep repeating the same steps before we realise we’re wrong?” concludes Yourlance.
The Government’s own document on Keeping Children Safe in Education states that the current legal approach doesn’t work and that the government wants to take a different approach. For further information please visit:
www.SELFguarding.co.uk
or contact Yourlance Richards for access to the formal results of the Pilot.
yourlance@SELFguarding.co.uk
+44 7891 557527
