CHILD SAFE ORGANISATIONS

Child Safe Organisations don't just happen. They're created through intention and action. Our Advisers go beyond policies and procedures and help organisations shift their culture to be child-focused, child-friendly and child-safe.

You could have the best written policy in the world, but if your team don't value it, it might as well not exist. Creating Child Safe Organisations is our passion project and it might give you the edge over your competitors to encourage your potential clients to pick you.

We can work with your organisation to set up ways of working that contribute to creating a child safe environment and help you identify and develop Champions to lead the change to ensure children are your first priority.

We believe in being clear from the start - we cannot turn your organisation in to a Child Safe Organisation. Only you and your people can do that. We can show you how though. We can coach you. We can support you. But you, as the head of your organisation need to lead your team to be Child-Safe.

ECEC & OSHC Sectors

We work with child-serving and child-contact organisations in all sectors, but our specialities are in the ECEC & OSHC sectors - and that starts with acknowledging that they’re different.

Our Principal Consultant has worked for some of the biggest names in both sectors, has an understanding of the NQF, NQS, My Time, Our Place, the National Law and the National Regulations.

PCA can provide all of the stated areas of practice on this page tailored to fit with the compliance, oversight and highly regulated environment that is the ECEC and OSHC sectors.

TRAINING

The world of child protection and child safeguarding is ever growing and evolving, and we’re not just talking about making a child protection report. With the consistent evolution of expectations, duty of care, and liability the level of accountability grows, and with it, the complexity.

It can be hard to ensure your team know how to protect children from harm. That’s where we come in. We specialise in providing face-to-face child safeguarding training and child protection / mandatory reporting training to child-serving organisations.

We have a ready-to-deliver options but can also tailor the training specifically for your organisation for a nominal cost. In the face of the coronavirus, we’ve also converted these sessions to be delivered in a virtual classroom setting which provides amazing out-of-hours delivery opportunities.

We don’t have a package for you? We can develop bespoke training to meet the specific needs of clients where we have the skill and knowledge to do so.

Child Protection Capability Frameworks

Clients consistently tell us they want their staff to be competent and capable of preventing, recognising and responding to child abuse and neglect and creating child-safe environments. They also tell us the organisation needs to have the internal capacity to be self sufficient in equipping their staff with child protection and child safeguarding skills and knowledge.

PCA can work with you, your child protection specialist and your learning and development team to design a child protection and child safeguarding capability framework tailored to your organisation’s specific needs. Don’t have internal L&D? No problem, PCA can arrange a third party review of our work for your piece of mind.

We take a two phased approach to developing your capability framework. In the first phase, we co-design and build out a ready to implement framework - just add content. In phase two, we work with you on a content development strategy that fits with your resources and budget. We can handle the whole thing, we can oversight and quality assure your internal content development, or you can take the framework to another provider altogether to build your training content for you.

Child-safe BUSINESS STRATEGY

We can work with you to ensure your business strategy is working for you to protect children. We can help with:

• Enterprise risk mitigation

• Vision and mission

• child-safe recruitment practices

• optimising for situational crime prevention and child-safe practice

• involving children in decision making

• strengthening communities and extending guardianship, and

• developing and implementing commitment to protecting children.

We work with you to ensure that child safety is part of your core business whether your organisation delivers services directly to children (child-serving) or has incidental contact with children as part of what you do (child-contact).

This offering is aimed at Boards and Leadership teams of child-serving organisations, but PCA has been pleasantly surprised by the level of interest from Sole Traders and trade-based organisations that provide services to child-serving organisations and also to child-contact organisations. This gives your clients a reason to choose your company over another - it is a point of difference that aligns your company's values with the priorities of your clients' to keep children safe.

POLICY Development & REVIEW

The legislation and regulation around child protection and child safeguarding is constantly in flux, so your policies must adapt quickly. PCA strive to anticipate these changes so you can focus more on your core business and know that you policies are protecting your children and yourselves as well. If your organisation is not large enough to require a dedicated child protection officer - this is a perfect service for you. We can develop your protecting children policies and procedures from scratch and we're also able to actively monitor them to ensure they're updated in line with any legislative changes. We advocate a 12 month review cycle and can work with you to establish a seamless, effortless (for your organisation) review and update schedule for you.

Already have policies in place? That's a great start! PCA can review them to ensure they're meeting your needs. Our Consultants and Advisers can work with you to make sure you policies are keeping children safe and mitigating risk.

It is important to recognise that, 'you don't know what you don't know.' If your in-house policy unit does not include a child protection specialist, your child protection policies may not cover everything you need them to. We're able to do a high level review of your protecting children policies and make recommendations to ensure your organisation has adequate preventative processes in place and reactive processes that protect children and keep your team safe.

INCIDENT REVIEW

We do everything we can to ensure that your business is working to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, but if there is a child harm incident in your centre, we're here to work with you to analyse the situation to make sure an incident like that can never happen again in your organisation. Our consultants can conduct an external review of your incident and provide advice to prevent it from re-occurring.

Our incident reviews take a child-centred, zero-blame approach and starts with a desktop review of the incident to develop a Review Plan. Your team need to feel safe in contributing to the review or you won't have usable outcomes and recommendations. To put it another way: we do not lead witch-hunts.

The perpetrator of child harm is totally responsible for their actions, but by taking a zero-blame approach to incident reviews we can help you make changes to your organisation and implement tools and systems that prevent perpetrators from harming children in the future.

Our first priority is to respond to incidents involving sexual abuse and exploitation of children, but we're also able to examine incidents involving physical abuse, emotional abuse or neglect of children as well.