Author: Jatinder Matharu Date: 11 January 2018
Terms of Reference
Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL) Forum
Purpose of Group:
The Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL) Forum will facilitate and coordinate a culture that embraces safeguarding as everybody’s business and ensures schools provide a safe system that safeguards children and young people.
It will provide a networking forum for school DSLs to keep up to date on the latest safeguarding issues both nationally and locally.
The forum will provide information and guidance to promote and assist in effective multi agency collaboration
to co-operate and discharge their statutory responsibilities effectively relating to safeguarding children and young people at risk. This may include updates from speakers in specialist safeguarding practice areas.
Responsibilities:
1. To strengthen the strategic communication with the Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards (LSCB) and Slough Borough Council (SBC) Schools Effectiveness team.
2. To provide a networking forum for school DSLs to keep up to date on the latest safeguarding issues and develop a relationship with the safeguarding partnership
3. To disseminate the latest safeguarding updates and briefings and provide support and professional development for DSLs
4. To be able to take time to reflect on and share best practice in a group setting
5. To advise schools on actions required following national inquiries; and national and local safeguarding reviews undertaken by external agencies (e.g. Ofsted, NSPCC) or internally across local providers in relation to safeguarding(e.g. LSCB, SBC), and to share learning from reviews to prevent repeat incidents.
6. To inform needs led safeguarding commissioning intentions for the future including plans to train staff in recognising and reporting safeguarding issues through the LSCB.
Membership:
The forum is aimed at school appointed Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) professionals in Slough.
Author: Jatinder Matharu Date: 11 January 2018
For the purposes of this forum schools will include all nursery, primary and secondary education provision. The forum is open to all maintained, community, voluntary aided, free, academies, faith and independent schools.
Relationship to other partnership forums
The DSL forum discussions may be fed back into the LSCB Education Sub group.
This will enable appropriate co-ordination and cohesion in terms of priorities for business plans and their operational delivery.
Accountability:
Jatinder Matharu, Education Safeguarding Officer - Children, Learning and Skills, Slough Borough Council will lead, organize, chair and circulate the papers for the meetings.
The group is jointly responsible for informing and shaping the agenda, sharing of local contextual information to inform discussion/debate at the forums and regular attendance. The agenda items for discussion will vary dependent upon local need and issues but will remain open and flexible for schools to include areas they wish to discuss around key priorities or issues. The chair will attempt to seek out solutions to facilitate discussion and debate.
Frequency of meetings:
The DSL Forum will meet termly (3 times per year). Meetings will be scheduled on an annual basis working to a 12 month forward calendar.
Other forms of communication will include a termly safeguarding newsletter and access to a schools exclusive web portal.
Working methods:
Only anonymized information will be shared in the forums therefore no information sharing protocols will be required.
Review Date of terms of reference:
These Terms of Reference will be reviewed and revised on an annual basis or as required if significant changes occur through national and /or local arrangements.
Date: January 2018 / Review Date: January 2019