Safeguarding at Little Stars

Little Stars has a high commitment to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children, staff and parents/carers. We ensure we set this out as an expectation and all staff and volunteers share this commitment.

Little Stars fully recognise how important our support ensures we protect all children on role and offer children and their families help and guidance if needed. 

The welfare and safety of our children and their families is of paramount importance and we promote this by:

•Developing strong relationships with all of our parents, carers and families and all of the children we care for. We provide a positive and supportive environment, that recognises needs within families and offer Early Help whenever necessary.
We follow robust safer recruitment procedures when employing staff or volunteers.

•We have a high regards to safeguarding policies and procedures and ensure all are followed at all times. We also ensure all staff receive high quality training to support and respond to any Child protection concerns. We have a strong Designated Safeguarding Team that attend yearly training to keep their skills up to date and therefore allows them to support a respond as necessary when issues or incidents may arise.

•We offer Early Help to all our families or children that are on role, if they are in need of support. Early Help is about taking action early and as soon as possible to tackle problems emerging for children, young people and their families. Early Help means providing support as soon as possible to help families cope with difficulties and working together with other services to prevent bigger problems emerging. Support can come from a range of services and organisations, for parents, children and young people of any age. Our setting is here to offer support and advice and sign post families for additional help and support they may require. We are not here to judge and want to be a support base for all our children and their families. Please speak to us if you feel you may need some advice or support and we will be happy to help.

•Staff receive regular training to identify concerns they may see. This covers all aspects of Safeguarding, such as PREVENT,     

E-Safety, FGM, Child Protection, How to recognise different forms of abuse, Working Together to Safeguard Children, How to make a referral and what to do if you feel a child is at risk of harm, Child Neglect, Child on Child abuse any many more.

Little Stars fully supports that Safeguarding is everybody’s business and we are always committed to ensuring that all of our children are safe, secure and that concerns can be identified and supported or a referral is made to social care if necessary.

Our Obligation to safeguard all children and families within our settings: -

All staff at Little Stars have a duty of care to recognise and report any areas of concern in regard to any children or families. All staff receive robust Safeguarding training to be able to assess any concerns that may arise. If we identify a concern with any child or family our procedure is as follows: -

-      Complete a report of the concern using a reporting concern log.

-      Staff will inform a member of our DSL team.
(Megan Gadsby – Designated Safeguarding Lead) (Molly Gadsby - Deputy Designated Safeguarding Lead)

-      The DSL team will make a judgement on how the concern will be dealt with.

This could mean: -

-      The concern is just logged and kept on file for our records.

-      The concern is logged and reported to the parent / carer and reported through to MASH (Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub).

The hub has an advice line that has a team that will help the DSL team within Little Stars assess what the best course of action may be. In many cases the advice may be for the Little Stars team to offer Early help advice and support. But in some circumstances the MASH team will require Little Stars to submit a formal referral to social care.

If the concern is deemed as serious and the report is logged by a formal referral to MASH. The DSL team may not inform the parent/carer. This is due to the concern posing an immediate risk or further risk to the child / family.