We all need a plan to confidently respond to children experiencing harmful sexual behaviour
Lorraine Myles
Monday, October 10, 2022
As an early career teacher, I understood that I had a personal responsibility to contribute to the safety and well-being of all the children in my care.
In the beginning this was largely determined by the conditions I was able to create in my lessons, while also being alert to any obvious signs of abuse or neglect presented by the children and young people I taught. But as my career developed, so did my understanding of the range of factors that influence how effectively education settings achieve their safeguarding responsibilities. Keeping informed and responding appropriately to these changing factors can feel overwhelming and for many education settings, this intensified following the Ofsted and Estyn reviews, published in 2021.
The Everyone's Invited platform generated an overwhelming number of testimonials, in which a tenth of England’s schools and colleges were named. If you have visited this platform, you may be struck, as I was, by the breadth of experiences shared by children and young people, with school-based incidents from the age of just four years taking place across all educational settings.
Sadly, many accounts reflected on how the inaction of adults contributed to ongoing trauma. For some, this inaction meant that the harassment and abuse continued, sometimes being repeated over months and years.
For many children, this failure to recognise and respond meant their recovery was, at best delayed, and at worst derailed. This was also reflected in the subsequent Ofsted (June 2021) Review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges and Estyn review We don’t tell our teachers - Experiences of peer-on-peer sexual harassment among secondary school pupils in Wales.
As professionals in education, we need to actively participate and support the recovery of children who have been impacted by harmful sexual behaviour.
Keeping children safe in education (2022) statutory guidance sets out expectations about what settings should consider when dealing with incidents of harmful sexual behaviour, but myself and my colleagues at the CSA Centre kept hearing from professionals that there was limited practical guidance available for education settings on how to actually do this.
I know from experience that this can be a challenging area to navigate and that fear of getting it wrong can sometimes immobilise us, but having a plan will help. That’s why we set out to create Safety Planning in Education - a guide for professionals supporting children following incidents of harmful sexual behaviour to support education professionals to develop their knowledge and understanding when dealing with incidents of harmful sexual behaviour.
Our ambition with this guide is that it will help professionals engage with children and their parents and carers with greater confidence, and effectively respond to and support the needs of children when there are incidents of harmful sexual behaviour.
It is designed to support professionals in all education settings. A confident, timely and effective response to these incidents has enormous potential to support the recovery of children who have experienced harmful sexual behaviour, and those who have caused the harm.
The guide is split into two: Part A looks at the key actions for a school when an incident of harmful sexual behaviour has occurred, including a safety plan template for recording, and reviewing arrangements, and Part B focusses on broader practical advice such as how to communicate with children and their parents in these circumstances and an appendix with useful links and resources.
When children and young people are involved in incidents of harmful sexual behaviour they need effective and timely support from their education setting and, where relevant, other agencies. If there is anything I know from my three decades in education, it’s that the education workforce is very skilled in managing difficult situations.
We can do this and I hope the Safety Planning in Education guide will go some way to giving education professionals the confidence to use those skills when supporting children impacted by harmful sexual behaviour.
Lorraine Myles is an education practice improvement advisor at the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre)
