Safer Working Practices For Those Working With Children And Young People In Education

Recent changes to non-statutory guidance produced by the Safer Recruitment Consortium

In May 2019 the Safer Recruitment Consortium (SRC) published an update to their guidance on safe working practices for those who work with children and young people in an education setting.

In line with the statutory guidance in Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE), all schools must have a staff code of conduct in place. The new revised non-statutory guidance is a useful starting point when considering guidelines for professional conduct towards children and young people. Although the guidance is non-statutory, it includes a foreword by Nadhim Zahawi MP, who was at that time Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families in the Department for Education. He welcomes the revised guidance and encourages those working in education to read it alongside KCSiE.

We outline below the key revisions to the SRC guidance.

Confidentiality

The guidance has been updated to reflect the new data protection rules found in the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation. Schools should ensure that staff understand their responsibilities under new data protection law and should only share records with those who have a legitimate professional need to see them.

Staff who need to share 'special category personal data' about children or young people (including information about their health, sex life and sexuality, racial or ethnic origin, or religious and philosophical beliefs) should be made aware that they can do so without consent when it is necessary for the purpose of safeguarding children and individuals at risk in cases where it is not possible or reasonable to gain consent, or if seeking consent would place a child at risk.

Standards of behaviour - changes to disqualification by association rules

This section has been updated in response to the Childcare (Disqualification) Regulations 2018. Under the former "disqualification by association" rules, someone working with children in the early years age range or in childcare for children under 8 provided by a school outside of school hours, and who lived in a household where a disqualified person lived or was employed, had a statutory duty to disclose this to their employer. This statutory duty to disclose was removed in August 2018. However, schools are expected to make it clear to all staff that they should disclose any relationship or association which may have implications...