Member Article

New partnership improves safeguarding training

A new North East partnership aims to transform the way people understand safeguarding and manage issues in the workplace and adult education.

Sunderland quality assurance software firm Mesma has teamed up with digital learning specialists Sub10, safeguarding specialists Psych-Logicalandtext analysis experts Wordnerds to launch a collaborative approach to online safeguarding training

The digital training centres on changing people’s behaviour by helping them to recognise and respond to signs that colleagues or students may be in difficulty.

The free-to-access training is designed around four simple-to-use online safeguarding essentials’ units. These progressively cover safeguarding and why it’s important, and are designed to encourage people to react by identifying areas of concern and how to respond appropriately. A fourth unit – Refer – helps the learner direct their concerns to the appropriate safeguarding specialists or agency.

Each unit provides one learning objective while four central characters are used to illustrate each point, as part of an emotive, hard-hitting storyline. It addresses difficult subjects, including suicide prevention and criminal exploitation. Collectively, they will offer the learner an on-going adaptive and personalised learning experience.

Staff and managers across education, youth services, public sector and commercial organisations can benefit, accessing the units as part of an overarching drive towards more effective safeguarding practices in their place of work or study.

Lou Willis-Keeler, founder at Psych-logical, said: “As soon as Louise Doyle at Mesma brought us into the conversation, we knew we wanted to play a part. In my experience, existing online safeguarding training provides lots of helpful information but I’m rarely convinced it results in sustainable change in people’s behaviour.

“That has to be our focus if we are to embrace the core principle that safeguarding the welfare of individuals is our collective responsibility. We hope our peers in corporate and small businesses will benefit by sharing the units with their own staff as much as those in sectors who are familiar with the term ‘safeguarding’ “

Sub-10 co-founder Peter Stephenson said: “Safeguarding is such an important area for us all to understand and to be able to recognise, respond to and refer possible issues. We hope that this training will start to raise people’s awareness and encourage them to learn more. We asked the Wordnerds team if they’d like to get involved having worked with them on other projects. They know from experience innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines between different companies.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mesma .