Safeguarding
Our Safeguarding Practice
At Portway Primary School, we believe that the welfare of every child is of paramount importance. Our school’s ethos and values ensure that pupils feel secure, are encouraged to talk, are listened to and are safe. Children at our school are able to talk freely to any member of staff at our school if they are worried or concerned about something. In addition, all children at our school have access to an on-site counselling service – Place2Be. Our safeguarding practices have been externally verified as excellent by the organisation SafeCIC, which has awarded us a Gold Standard across all areas of safeguarding. Our school is currently working with SafeCIC regarding reaccreditation.
Safeguarding our children underpins everything we do at school. As part of Newham Community Learning, at Portway Primary School we follow the protocols and procedures outlined in the Trust wide Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy, available on the Policies Page of our Trust website. The policy includes named contacts at all six schools with the Trust, was last updated in July 2024 further to the release of the DfE’s Keeping Children Safe in Education May 2024 document available on this page of gov.uk, which, pending final publication, comes into effect on 01 September 2024.
The Trust Board of Newham Community Learning has a Lead Safeguarding trustee, details of which can be found on the Governance Page of the Trust website. Our local governing body at school also has a designated governor who leads safeguarding; James Johnston is also a Trust appointed governor.
Our safeguarding practices are further supported by our Safer Recruitment Policy, which details how all staff and volunteers are brought on board, including all the checks that are undertaken. This is also available for review on the Policies Page of the Trust website.
In addition to paid staff and volunteers, there are a number of visitors to our school. In order to ensure the safety of our children, all visitors to our school are asked to read our Visitors’ leaflet and safeguarding advice which outlines our Safeguarding Procedures.
All staff at Portway Primary School receive annual Safeguarding Training. In addition, specific training, including Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Training and Prevent Duty Training is also provided.
Contact details for our Safeguarding Team are below:
Our Digital Safeguarding Arrangements
As per Keeping Children Safe in Education 2024, the comprehensive arrangements we have in place across all our school systems ensure that our children are kept safe when using the internet and its wealth of resources to support their learning. An overview of our filtering and monitoring arrangements is provided in this document.
In addition, we ensure that we communicate with parents and carers regarding all the websites that our children regularly interact with as part of their learning – a regularly updated listing is provided here.
The way in which we approach online safety at school continues to evolve. Our Trust Policies page provides a copy of our Online Safety Principles Statement. Our Behaviour Page provides a link to our school Online Safety Policy.