Safeguarding

Safeguarding Culture

Overley Hall places great emphasis on creating a strong ‘culture of safety’ through embedding safeguarding into everything we do. We believe this culture starts at the top of the school with the senior managers pledging their absolute commitment and support including ensuring the resources are available to make it happen.

We believe the culture of safety is fully embedded into our ethos, aims and values. As well as been driven and guided by robust policies and systems with a strong focus on keeping our learners and staff safe, our ethos, aims and values are very much scaffolded by a strong ‘safeguarding vision’ which we believe leads to:

• Bountiful amounts of professional curiosity radiating throughout, ensuring our team are constantly vigilant, looking, listening and questioning, supported by the resilient, ever-present leadership.
• Prolific sense of feeling valued, being listened to, and being instrumental in a ‘can do’ and solution focused culture. This helping to create a culture of openness and transparency.
• Informed Positive Support Plans, created and updated following the extensive debriefing which is inherent following both difficult and positive incidents that can occur.
• A strong sense of respect for listening and responding to ‘pupil voice’. What are our learners trying to communicate through their voice, their behaviour and their gestures?
• A strong commitment to developing pupil voice and the tools to enable expression by implementing a multidisciplinary methodology driven by our therapy and clinical support who also share and promote the vision.
• A curriculum and pedagogy which fosters the development of: communication skills, engagement, problem solving, decision making, understanding of feelings and emotions, expression of feelings, ability to generalise skills, likes and dislikes, greater understanding of ‘right and wrong’ and how to get help when needed.
• A person centred approach, placing the child and their individual needs at the heart of the provision we create for them. This builds positive relationships, reduces anxiety, and promotes engagement and motivation to access learning opportunities. All of which creates a more harmonious milieu. This child friendly approach enables staff to really get to know the child, enables us to sense and read their language and behaviours, and work proactively to support positive outcomes.
• An open and welcoming school to family, advocates, carers and involved professionals who can also be the ’voice of the child’ as a result of our ‘Open Door Policy’.

Please click on the highlighted words above to find out more about how we safeguard our learners here at Overley Hall School. You can also look through our list of, Safeguarding links.

To find out more about our policies which help to safeguard our learners, click here and read the following policies:

In addition you can learn more about safeguarding by clicking and reading the following documents: