Child Safeguarding Guidelines-Playbook SB

**Child Safeguarding at Oak Foundation** **Guidance Notes for Oak Programme Staff** ***Oak's vision for child safeguarding*** The rights, safety and protection of children is of paramount concern to Oak Foundation. As set out in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, every child has the ri...

**Child Safeguarding at Oak Foundation** **Guidance Notes for Oak Programme Staff** ***Oak's vision for child safeguarding*** The rights, safety and protection of children is of paramount concern to Oak Foundation. As set out in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to a life free of violence and abuse. As a part of our respon­sibility for the safety and protection of children, the first Oak Child *Safeguarding Policy* was adopted in 2013 and revised in 2018. **Child safeguarding** is the responsibility that Oak Foundation has; to make sure our staff, operations, and grant-making does no harm to children; and that it does not expose children to the risk of harm and abuse. **\ In developing its Safeguarding Children Policy,** **Oak Foundation committed to** **striving to prevent abuse and promote the safety, protection, well-being and development of children** **in** **all its programmes.\ \ Oak also believes that adults engaged in positions of trust towards children must exercise the highest levels of integrity and good practice.** **There is an obligation on all organisations and professionals working or in contact with children to ensure their operations are 'child safe'.** **In light of the strongly held protection commitments and principles outlined above, Oak Foundation requests that** **all grantees subscribe to, and operate in accordance with, these values and beliefs. As part of making awards to prospective grantees, the Foundation carries out stringent due diligence checks. Where organisations are applying for funding to support project work that involves working or contact with children**[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1.footnote-ref}**, part of this assessment will include evaluating the extent to which prospective grantees have in place measures designed to safeguard children.\ ** ***Scope and use of this document*** This document provides programme staff with: - An overview of Oak's approach to child safeguarding - Information about how to assess safeguarding risks in your grant making - The grantee support process, including the role of programme staff - The process to follow in case safeguarding incidents are reported to you ***Identifying risks*** Oak has a moral and, in some cases, legal responsibility to assess the safeguarding risk of the work we support. Oak takes a risk-based approach to child safeguarding. We focus our priority and support on those grantees whose work, by its nature, poses risks to children. When analysing risk, we consider the following: 1. Contact with and access to children. This includes the type and duration of contact as well as the intimacy of the relationship with the child. The more in-depth contact and access to the child, the higher the risk. 2. Organisational ability to decrease and mitigate risk. This includes existing policies and procedures, the organisational culture, the national systems and monitoring of charitable activities. The more safeguards in place, the lower the risk. All Oak grantees are required to fill in a safeguarding self-audit. This provides information about their contact with children (type, duration etc.) as well as rating themselves based on the Oak safeguarding standards. Ideally the risk assessment is done by a cross-section of partner staff in a group setting. However, POs also play a critical external role in assessing risk. POs know the work of grantees, their strengths and their weaknesses. They review the self-audit and can challenge grantees' answers if appropriate. POs can help shape the appropriate level of support. POs are responsible for identifying, rating and following-up on grantee safeguarding issues. Analysing contact with children and organisational capacity to mitigate risk provides a broad risk rating: high, medium or low. Clearly this is not an exact science, nor a once and for all exercise. This risk rating can and should be adjusted over time. Contact with and access to children ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------- -------- ----- -- High Medium Low Organisational capacity to mitigate risk Low Medium High All grantee partners coming into contact with children need to assess the risks their programming, operations and services have on children. Depending on the level of contact, the grantee may need to develop a policy or put in place other safeguarding measures such as a code of conduct, media policies, human resource measures or risk assessments. Oak grantee partners that are in contact with children or working with children need to put in place safeguarding measures. This should include, but not be limited to, the development of a child safeguarding policy. Oak believes that a child safe organisation goes well beyond policy alone. Safeguarding should be embedded throughout the organisation and will affect staff skills needed; the structure, the budget and the leadership. Oak believes that child safe organisations can only come about if the culture supports it -- with a 'duty of care' intent embedded into hearts and minds. Based on this analysis: - Low risk organisations are not required to put in place any safeguarding measures but are signposted to resources and organisations that can provide support. - High risk organisations should have a safeguarding grant condition added to their grant and they should be referred for 'deep-dive' support to selected organisations.. ***Supporting*** ***capacity building for child safeguarding*** Oak's approach to safeguarding is based on the belief that the grantee must own their own capacity building. Our role as a funder is to ensure that they have access to the support they need on their journey to more effective safeguarding. For low risk grantee, it may be enough to provide them with the Oak Child Safeguarding Resource Pack (forthcoming) and monitor their progress through regular follow-up Grantees who have medium level contact with children, but good safeguarding measures in place only need monitoring by Oak, but if they do not have organisational measures in place, they should be treated as high risk. High risk grantees, if they do not have adequate safeguards in place and implemented can be referred to specialist external service providers. In previous years, we focused on assisting grantees develop their child safeguarding policies, but now we go further to focus on the implementation of these policies. We have engaged a number of regionally-based service providers to support partners with this (see Appendix 1 or URL link): We expect that this regional support will be more contextually and culturally relevant and reflect the operational reality of our grantees. We do not yet have full geographical coverage and you might find that the services listed here below are not appropriate for your grantees. Referral to one of the service providers is not the only option.  ***Your role as a Programme Officer in*** ***safeguarding*** POs have a key role to play throughout the grant cycle: **[Pre-application]** POs provide information to make grantees aware of how important child safeguarding is for Oak, and we share our safeguarding standards. POs can also ask relevant questions to put safeguarding onto partner's agendas. POs should be able to confidently present Oak's approach to safeguarding (link to Oak PO script in Appendix 2). **[Application phase]** During the application phase, POs can: - Request key documents such as safeguarding policy, sexual harassment policy, whistleblower policy. All contribute to a safe environment and indicate a safety aware culture - Ask grantee to fill self-audit. - Some of the key things to look for are... something missing here **[Grant recommendation phase]** In grant recommendations POs can 1. Consider grant condition 2. Provide access to capacity building support Oak offers support to partners to develop, improve or monitor their safeguards, through referrals to service providers that are pre-vetted by Oak and that understand the operational reality of grantees, either through their geographical presence or expert field-knowledge. See Appendix 1 for more detail of both the providers and the process for referral. 3. Provide funding In exceptional circumstances, Oak can provide specific funding to a partner to create a child safeguarding policy. **[Grant monitoring phase]** **Desk-based monitoring** Checking-in with your grantee from time to time on safeguarding helps emphasise the message that this is important to Oak. It can help align expectations. This also allows for any course correction with the service provider. The Housing and Homelessness team put these three questions to their grantees as a part of their regular progress reporting. When they send out reminders that progress reports are due, they ask grantees to answer the following: 1. Tell us about your progress in implementing child safeguarding 2.  Has the level of risk / contact with children increased or decreased over the last year? If your answer is yes to either or both of these questions, please tell us how this has changed. 3.  What was your experience of dealing with the organisation who contacted you regarding developing your child safeguarding policy?  Do you have any suggestions regarding the way they work? These three simple questions can elicit a detailed and nuanced replies, which helps you gain an understanding of the safeguarding practices at the grantee organisation. **Site visits** Site visits are a great opportunity to discuss safeguarding in person and can give you an important view of whether safeguarding is something that is being implemented in practice. We recognise that you have many topics and issues to get through during your visits and safeguarding doesn't have to be an add on. A possible way forward is: *missing?* **Responding to safeguarding incidents** ***What to do if there is a safeguarding incident?*** Grantees are not mandated to report breaches of their own safeguarding policies to Oak. An existing relationship of trust might mean that the grantee will inform you of breaches to their safeguarding policy. There are multiple reasons for this including: - the concern going public and the grantee wants to ensure we as a donor are given an accurate picture - grantee needs support, funding or guidance to resolve the safeguarding incident - grantee wants to ensure full transparency in the relationship with Oak It is important that you follow the below process in case you receive information about a safeguarding incident, whether or not it is verified. Oak has a crisis response team consisting of the following people xxxxx It is very unlikely that we receive a report of something that hasn't already been dealt with by the grantee, but if we do, step 1 is always to ensure the safety of the children concerned. The escalation process is as follows: Step 1: report Step 2: document Step 3: follow-up **Process** ***Do you need a conclusion or something here?\ *** ***Appendix 1*** ***2019 Service providers*** The following service providers will be offering support to Oak grantees. They each work in a specific geographical area. In the USA we have two providers on offer. Praesidium is better suited to larger organisations, intermediaries and networks. Darkness to Light is better suited to smaller direct service provision organisations. +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **Service | **Geography** | **Focal point** | **Contact | | provider** | | | details** | +=================+=================+=================+=================+ | **Darkness to | USA | Ivy de Angelis | ideangelis\@d2l | | Light** | | |.org | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **Praesidium** | USA | Candace Collins | ccollins\@praes | | | | | idiuminc.com | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **Give a Child | Southern Africa | Steven Wetton | steven\@gcf.org | | a Family** | | |.za | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **IIDC** | Eastern Africa | Regina Kachwamu | rkachwamu\@gmai | | | | | l.com | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **KCS** | Eastern Europe | Stefan Yordanov | stefan.yordanov | | | | | \@keepingchildr | | | | (should always | ensafe.org.uk | | | | be in cc) | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | | India | Vijay Baskar | vijay.baskar\@k | | | | | eepingchildrens | | | | | afe.org.uk | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | | Central America | Juan Diego | juanjo796\@gmai | | | | Oquendo | l.com | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ **[The referral process:]** The referral process is as follows, for all service providers. 1. I will start by introducing you to them via email, so that you have their contact details. 2. You will introduce the service provider to each of your grantees via email. In your message you will give information about the organisation, the focal person who will providing them support and the steps of the process. All this information is found in the service provider briefs that I have attached to this message. 3. The focal point now has the ball in their court and will initiate contact with the grantee, asking for a phone call to plan their support. It is up to you whether you want to take part in those calls or not. I would encourage you to do one or two, just so that you learn about the services that will be provided and so that you feel prepared to answer any questions that future grantees might have about the support. 4. You will be kept in cc of correspondence with the grantee, unless you prefer not to. 5. The focal point will keep me up to date on progress through regular reports. I will in turn keep them informed and their responsibility is to pass that information on to you. 6. During your regular follow up with the grantee, I would appreciate if you could ask how the safeguarding support is going. These are new service providers and we would like to course correct as needed, based on grantee feedback. Please provide any information to your focal point and they will pass the information on to me. Also, please note that you are more than welcome to attend any grantee training organised by the service provider. Please let me know if this would be of interest to you and I will make sure to keep you informed of planned trainings. ***Service provider briefs:*** I have asked each service provider to give us brief information about themselves and their work. This can be found here (hyperlinks). These briefs can be used when explaining service to grantees via email or phone and will save you time. **\ ** **Appendix 2 Safeguarding script** **1) Why** **2) What** **3) How** ::: {.section.footnotes} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. ::: {#fn1} ***[Contact with children]*** means working on an activity or in a position that involves or may involve contact with children, either under the position description or due to the nature of the work environment. This includes indirect contact with children in the community. ***[Working with children]*** means being engaged in an activity with a child where the contact would reasonably be expected as a normal part of the activity and the contact is not incidental to the activity. Working includes volunteering or other unpaid work.[↩](#fnref1){.footnote-back} ::: :::