Child Safeguarding Corner

 Child Safeguarding Corner

The Child Safe Standards provide tangible guidance about how to create cultures, adopt strategies, and act to keep children safe from harm. Each fortnight, I present one of the standards and ask you to reflect on how you think we’re addressing the recommendations. We welcome ideas and feedback from our families and community!

This week, we’re looking at Standard 8: Physical and online environments minimise the opportunity for abuse or other kinds of harm to occur.

This standard aims to identify and minimise risks to children in physical and online environments at school.  This standard is necessary because safe physical environments play a significant role in reducing opportunities for abuse to occur. 

We aim to prioritise this standard for child safety in what we say and do:

• Leaders set expectations about behavioural standards for staff interacting with children in physical and online environments. Our Code of Conduct sets clear behavioural expectations about adult interactions with children. 
• Risk assessment and management plans identify risks to child safety in physical and online environments and how these will be managed.
• Physical environments are considered. We increase natural lines of sight while respecting a child’s right to privacy. 
• Children are provided information about online safety and regularly encouraged to tell staff about negative experiences. 
• Staff and parents are provided with information about risks in the online environment. 

Indicators of success for this standard include: 

• Opportunities to harm children are reduced or removed.
• Children engage in creative and safe activities.
• Children speak up about risks in the online environment.
• Children’s privacy is balanced with the need to keep them safe. 

If we are addressing this standard successfully, we would expect our children to say: 

• I know there are some spaces in the school I am not allowed into. 
• I can talk to someone I trust about anything I have seen or done online.

We now have a page on our school website dedicated to Child Safeguarding, and we encourage you to view it. 

If you have any questions or feedback about how we are addressing this particular Standard or about our new Child Safeguarding page, please email me (petra.cole@cg.catholic.edu.au). 

Friendology

St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps our students establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience. One of the first foundational concepts in the friendship skills curriculum is the four Friendship Facts.

Knowing what to expect in our friendships makes it much easier to understand and accept the ups and downs.

The 4 Friendship Facts were developed because it was noticed that children weren’t sure what was “normal” or common in their friendships. These 4 Friendship Facts are the foundation of a healthy, respectful friendship and apply to relationships throughout life:

1. No friendship (relationship) is perfect.
2. Every friendship is different.
3. Trust and respect are the two most important qualities of a friendship. 
4. Friendships change…and that’s ok.

Do you often find yourself at a loss for advice when your children come to you with their friendship issues? Don’t worry—you’re not alone. You can join URSTRONG for free and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills that we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open up a dialogue with your children. You can join URSTRONG for free at https://urstrong.com/.

Petra Cole

Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher