Safeguarding
St. Matthew’s is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.
We believe that pupils have a right to learn in a supportive, caring and safe environment which includes the right to protection from all types of abuse, and we are committed to working with our parents to ensure that all children have the best possible outcomes. We regularly train our staff to be vigilant for signs of any pupil in distress and are confident about applying our safeguarding processes to make sure that all children at St Matthew's are safe.
If concerns are raised in school about the welfare or protection of a child, these may be passed on to Hillingdon Children's Services. Passing this information on is our legal responsibility as a school. Hillingdon Children's Services may then decide to conduct an investigation to decide if a child is at risk of harm. When passing information to Children's Services, we aim to do this with the knowledge and consent of the child's parents, however this may not always be possible.
We have a number of policies and procedures in place that contribute to our safeguarding commitment, including our Child Protection Policy which can be viewed in the Policies section of our website.
Safeguarding team:
- The Designated Safeguarding Lead is Mrs Saira Malik
- The Deputy Safeguarding Leads are Mrs Lisa Maher, Mrs J. Dempsey, Miss Laura Dewar, Miss Corrina Blake and Mr Elliott Small
- The Safeguarding Governor is Mr Richard Jones
- Our Designated Teacher for Looked After Children is Megan Greenwood
Early Help
We are able to provide our families support from a Family Support Worker, who can signpost parents to services and provide support with many aspects of family life. We also work closely with the Participation Team at The London Borough of Hillingdon to support children in attending school regularly. Our School Nurse is also able to support families and provide access to services.
Operation Encompass
The aim of Operation Encompass is to enable staff in every school to understand how to support children who are experiencing domestic abuse. This directly connects the police with schools to ensure better outcomes for children who are subject to or witness to police-attended incidents of domestic abuse. This means that children are better safeguarded against short, medium and long term effects of abuse.
Educating your child about abuse:
As part of our Safeguarding curriculum, we educate children about consent, to help them to understand that their body belongs to them, and they should tell a safe adult they trust if anything makes them feel upset or worried. The PANTS rule was developed by the NSPCC to help children know what is safe and what is not when it comes to body boundaries. You can find more information about this here.
We develop children's understanding of this through:
- Our Wellbeing Curriculum
- Our Consent Curriculum
- PANTS day
- Social Stories
Staying Safe Online
We use SENSO technology in school to ensure that children are kept safe online. Our filtering and monitoring is managed by lgfl, and is regularly tested and checked to ensure that it is robust. Our computing curriculum and wellbeing curriculum teach children how to stay safe when online in school and at home, and how to gte support if needed.
Please see the Online Safety page of our website, and look at these useful Links for Parents: