Me Learning, a specialist provider of social care training, today announced it is releasing a new ‘Safeguarding’ online training course for all professionals involved in the care of children and young adults.
Me Learning’s Safeguarding module will provide a comprehensive introduction to safeguarding and child protection and will form part of its Every Child Matters (ECM) suite that covers every aspect of training all professionals working with children and young adults require. This announcement is timely in light of Lord Laming’s report in March of this year on the safeguarding and protection of children, entitled “The Protection of Children in England: A Progress Report” (published 12th March 2009).
In his report, Lord Laming recommends that as well as greater leadership and accountability, more resources should be put towards commissioning training on child protection and safeguarding. Out of the 58 recommendations published in the report, 23 of them (40%) relate to training, learning or professional development. Rather than just focusing on the training of social workers, Lord Laming clearly states that the training should cover all staff who work with children, including professionals in the health, education and judicial sectors, to create a shared language. He also stipulates that managerial positions should undertake training, including inspectors, Serious Case Review panel chairs and authors, the Local Safeguarding Children Board chair, senior political leaders and service managers.
Every Children’s Trust is now expected to undertake a thorough needs assessment of its local population as part of its Children and Young People’s Plan. This assessment needs to ensure that there is a sufficient level of multi-agency training in place to create a shared language and understanding of local referral procedures, assessment, information sharing and decision making across early years, schools, youth services, health, police and other services who work to protect children.
Me Learning’s Safeguarding module is being developed following Lord Laming’s recommendations to the Children’s Trusts and will ensure that all staff who work with children receive initial training and ongoing professional development that will enable them to understand the normal development of a child and recognise the potential signs of neglect or abuse. With the roll-out planned for July 2009, Me Learning’s suite will provide induction training, in-depth training for individual specialisms and provide a broader overview for managerial levels. Other courses in the suite include Information Sharing, ContactPoint, Lead Professional, ICS (Integrated Children’s System) and CAF (Common Assessment Framework).
Like all Me Learning courseware, the online training is interactive for effective learning and enables users to earn a Certificate of achievement when they complete the course. The courses are aimed at building an understanding of why certain processes and protocols are in place, as well as teaching the rules and regulations, how to correctly record the information and who is responsible for each area of the safeguarding and protection of children.
Safeguarding will take approximately 90 minutes to complete and consists of 17 overview tutorials covering the following topics: safeguarding; child abuse; physical abuse; sexual abuse; emotional abuse; neglect and the child protection process. The tutorial also includes several examples of scenarios where abuse may be present and asks the user to choose the next course of action. This, together with learning games and quizzes, ensures the knowledge learnt is continually tested and re-enforced as the user progresses through the course.