What are you most proud about from your time leading the NSPCC?
I'm proud that we kept safeguarding, child abuse, and neglect in the public consciousness creating a much clearer kind of awareness and understanding of the nature, the scale and the prevalence of these issues.
I'm pleased that we've been at the forefront of campaigning for the online world to be as safe for children as the offline world. We don't believe children should be shut away from life. They have rights to enjoy the benefits of childhood, whether or not there's risk associated with childhood. We were at the forefront of campaigning for an Online Safety Act in the UK, placing legal obligations on the people designing digital products and services, to exercise a duty of care to the young people using them. Finally, we’ve worked to create a near universal presence in UK schools to make it easy for more organisations, young people and families to learn, in an age-appropriate way, about how to stay safe from abuse, in a manner which ought to feel natural and straightforward.
Let’s talk about safeguarding in schools and maybe start with the obvious: why is safeguarding so important?
I think that a safe and happy child is a child who is ready and able to learn and grow. Creating an environment of physical and psychological safety and wellbeing, is good in its own terms, but it's also great for helping young people learn about one another and flourish to achieve their potential. Having regard to safety and wellbeing feels like a necessary precondition for everything else.
How do you see safeguarding changing, and what are some of the challenges for schools right now?
I think there's been increased attention on safeguarding because people have seen things go wrong for children in terrible ways. This has led to a codification of rules, procedures and practices, with associated obligations to be compliant. From a legal point of view, compliance is vital and one can derive some comfort from the existence of rules and people with job descriptions that operate in this space.
But, a consequence of this can be that people fail to see beyond the rules and a healthy safeguarding culture really does matter. It's the actual experiences that young people are thinking and feeling, and healthy relationships including among staff members and adults in schools that really determine the safety of an environment.
It’s a big challenge. How do we test and assess that culture? How do we understand and talk to one another and reflect on the healthiness and happiness of relationships in and around schools? And in ensuring adherence to our legal obligations, people are feeling safe and comfortable.
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