Safeguarding training is an often overlooked aspect of teacher training, but here are the reasons we need it most.
Not all of us realise the scale of a teacher’s role. They spend long hours preparing lesson plans, long hours teaching the lessons, and long hours adjusting, planning the next day, and marking work. A teacher’s role exists 75% outside of the classroom. It’s not a job you can leave behind you when you clock out for the day and go home for the night. Teaching is tough, and an underappreciated aspect of it lies in safeguarding training.
What is Safeguarding Training?
Safeguarding training is the training that teachers get early on during their studies. They are taught briefly how to spot children or students who may be in trouble outside of class. Safeguarding training given inside a classroom during your teacher training is one thing but applying that training during the course of your career is quite a different matter. To this end, we recommend that teaching staff take a refresher course on an annual basis to ensure child protection while in your care.
Safeguarding training teachers your educators how to spot signs of a troubled family life. Children who act out, seek attention, or become bullies, often do this as a result of unstable home conditions. As the cost of living crisis deepens in the UK, we can expect an increased level of hunger in children, too. All of these are things that a course such as Hays Safeguarding Training could help your teachers spot.
3 Reasons We Need Safeguarding Training in Schools
With all of the above in mind, here are three top reasons we need to teach our educators about safeguarding on a repeat cycle.
1 – To Protect the Vulnerable
The primary reason we need to teach safeguarding to educators is to protect the vulnerable. Our children don’t know how to spot the same dangers we can see as adults. they need someone looking out for them to make sure they don’t fall into danger themselves as a result. Teachers and parents are the first lines of defence against predatory behaviour against children. Sending them on refresher training courses about spotting the dangers is common sense. If your school develops a reputation as a place that spots dangers, you will attract new students, year after year.
2 – To Protect our Teachers
Imagine for a second that you are a teacher that fails to spot clues of domestic violence towards a child in your classroom. Imagine if that child then dies. How tortured would you be as an educator to find out that a child in your care died because you missed the signs that might have been obvious to someone with better training? Don’t put this on your teachers. It’s not fair.
3 – To Teach Future Generations
Future generations will learn about the potential dangers and issues like DV and neglect from the people that teach them. Kids might not know that what they experience at home isn’t normal until they are taught so. What they learn in class will stay with them into their adult lives. As teachers with safeguarding training, we have the ability to break those cycles. It’s our job to try.
