The Safe Network's funding from the Department for Education (DfE) continues until April 2013. This will support our vital work helping keep children and young people safe in voluntary and community sector.
The successful partnership between NSPCC, Children England and Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT) enables us to provide even greater support and advice to the voluntary sector in England covering all areas of safeguarding.
However, like many services at present there has been some reduction in funding in comparison to previous years and, after the DfE funding finishes in march 2013, the Safe Network will need to become self sustaining.
We remain dedicated to supporting our existing voluntary and community sector partners and will also develop more targeted support to:
• identify ways for the Safe Network to become self sustaining
• continue developing new strategic partnerships with other organisations or networks
• work with specialist groups to develop new resources
• update key Safe Network resources including the Are they safe? pack, Keeping our children safe (BME CD ROM resource) and the core safeguarding standards
• expand the safeguarding champions work
• evaluate all the work we do via Charities Evaluation Services.
During 2011/12 we have been recruiting and training a pool of local champions to support and endorse our core safeguarding standards in their local communities. We provide the champions with support and access to all of the Safe Network resources which they can use to promote safeguarding issues in their area – if you would like further information check out the champions section the website.
We have also developed a modular training package 'Safe organisations, safe children' to help assist groups in the implementation of the core safeguarding standards in their organisations.
We will actively support organisations in commissioning and delivering quality, cost-effective programmes that capitalise on the voluntary and community sector expertise plus aiming to continue delivering safeguarding training with the addition of ‘learning nuggets’ and master-classes to share expert knowledge.
The team will continue to produce high quality up to date and user friendly web based resources and will update both the Safe Network website and our standards accordingly to reflect relevant changes in legislation.
We will be busy putting together a detailed business plan that reflects the needs and priorities of the community and voluntary sector, so please sign up to our newsletter to ensure you receive the most up to date information and remember to register so you can have full access to the standards resources.
