safeguarding – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The importance of safeguarding

This week I attended an online training session on safeguarding, something which is included as part of my membership of The Tutors’ Association. The session is by no means the only way in which I keep my knowledge and awareness of safeguarding and child protection up to date, but it is one of the many things I choose to do to stay informed. I say “choose,” because tutoring remains an unregulated industry and — contrary to what many parents may assume — there are currently no legal protections in place to safeguard minors or their families when it comes to private tuition.

Last year, the BBC reported that more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children within the past 20 years. This is frankly horrifying. The children’s commissioner for England called for reform in light of the findings, but currently there is still no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people; there are also no guidelines about training for tutors when it comes to safeguarding (or indeed anything else).

While I labour under no illusions that teacher training is the be-all and end-all when it comes to education, indeed I would rate my own PGCE from St John’s College, Cambridge as one of the most woefully inadequate and borderline useless qualifications I have to my name, at least that process required some formal training in safeguarding. Beyond that, if a tutor is a qualified teacher with experience in schools (and by the way, those two things are not the same thing at all!) then they will have been put through mandatory safeguarding training on a regular basis, in accordance with the law. For this reason more than any other, I would personally be rigorously frisking any tutor who has no longterm experience in classroom teaching as part of their background for evidence that they are alert to and aware of the meaning and importance of safeguarding. People should be particularly aware that there are plenty of tutors who advertise the fact that they have a teaching qualification, but in fact they spent no time in the classroom beyond their training year. From a safeguarding perspective, this will mean that they are very inexperienced and will not have done much training in this area.

The current lack of regulation means not only that many tutors do not bother to secure a DBS check for themselves (the process is actually not as easy as you might think, and requires you to be attached to a recognised organisation who will process it for you), but perhaps even more concerningly many of them do not have experience of any training in safeguarding. A simple browse through online discussions between tutors reveals a plethora of would-be professionals claiming that membership of a professional organisation is “not worth it” and that securing a DBS is “not necessary, because parents don’t ask.” As for training, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that it might be important or useful for them.

My own role in schools was broadly that of a classroom teacher with the occasional bit of further responsibility thrown in, and I climbed no further up the pastoral ladder than the role of form tutor. Despite this, I always took the safeguarding aspects of my job extremely seriously. Not only did I follow and absorb all training to the letter, I used to (and still do) read the relevant serious case reviews published by the government; they are now archived by the NSPCC. Such reviews are, in my opinion, important for ordinary members of any workforce who come into contact with children, as they often highlight individual and institutional failings that everyone should be aware of. Despite this, I have never met anyone else in my profession who reads them, except people who have to do so as a part of their job description (Designated Safeguarding Leads).

The training I attended this week was good and I said so. Let’s be honest, I am notoriously difficult to please, being one of those teachers that has sat through so many shockingly poor in-service training sessions that I have become what I am more than prepared to admit is hyper-cynical. I’m deeply intolerant of any kind of flannel and even less tolerant of what I like to call institutional back-patting, when everyone sits around and tells each other what a terrific job they’re doing. I see this a lot in tutoring: it’s usually dressed up as “this is a positive/safe space” but really it amounts to nothing more than ridiculous complacency arising from a lack of challenge, which is not good for any professional in my humble opinion. But The Tutors’ Association have done a good thing in appointing Holly Goodwin as their Designated Safeguarding Lead and indeed it is testament to the vastly improved professional approach of the new regime in the Association that it has appointed a DSL in the first place. Holly has experience as a DSL in schools in both the state and the independent sector. She now works as a consultant and trainer in schools, universities, children’s homes, hospices and charities, helping organisations to build safer environments for children and vulnerable adults. So, she’s a great appointment, and it is really good to know that I can contact her for advice.

One of the things I miss most about being in a school is being able share my low-level hunches in an appropriate way. People without experience in this area often imagine that safeguarding is high-drama revelations and interventions, and of course, sometimes such things happen. Most of the time, however, the process is all about the little tiny things, the things that seem like nothing in isolation. As a tutor, if I notice something small like a child being consistently tired, or I note that the father seems somewhat domineering, I cannot do anything with such an observation. As a classroom teacher, I would have shared my thoughts on the confidential system. My school, like many, used CPOMs, a software system designed to streamline safeguarding concerns within institutions. We were actively encouraged to log even the most insignificant of observations, because they might form part of a wider picture. In an ideal world, when safeguarding training is really effective, every teacher is proactively using the system on a regular basis; as a result, for some children, a picture starts to form from all the little tiny raised flags, something which might start to indicate a bigger cause for concern. Thus, while an individual observation such as “Dad seems a bit domineering” would never warrant any kind of intervention on its own (it is not illegal to be an unpleasant man), it might one day be relevant to a bigger picture that does indeed lead to further investigation. I don’t have access to anything like this now, and I really miss it.

UK schools are among the most important places for children’s safeguarding because they serve as a central, consistent and regulated environment where children spend a significant portion of their time. Teachers and other school staff see children daily, allowing them to observe patterns of behaviour, appearance, and emotional wellbeing. Because of this routine contact, schools are often the first place where signs of concern are noticed. I really do miss being part of this schema and am alert to the fact that private tutoring puts individuals like me in a rather different position from a regular teacher, who is a part of something bigger.

What price safety?

Within the last week, the BBC have reported that over the past 20 years more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children. Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, is now calling for reform in light of the BBC’s findings. Currently, there is no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people.

No legal definition exists of “tutor” and anyone can set themselves up as one. This also applies to many other professional-sounding titles such as “counsellor” or (one which might shock you slightly more because it sounds kind of medical) a “psychotherapist”. These are not legally-protected terms and the gravitas which people tend to assume they embody is entirely imagined. This is not true of all professional services. To take one example, I regularly see an osteopath. By law, to call himself an osteopath, the person that I see must be registered with the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC), which only accepts practitioners who have a qualification in osteopathy that is recognised by them. They must also comply with their standards of practice. Osteopathy is therefore a regulated health profession and you can look up the details of this on the NHS website.

While a professional body for tutoring with proper checks and a Code of Practice does exist in the form of The Tutors’ Association, membership is entirely voluntary and is shockingly small in comparison with the number of adults who are actively marketing themselves as a “tutor” and taking people’s money for their services. This should give all of us pause. One of the things that has troubled me most about leaving the teaching profession and switching to self-employment is the feeling of being in the wild west when it comes to safeguarding and due diligence. All you need to do is to take a sweep through Facebook chat rooms to discover hundreds of self-employed tutors chatting openly and almost proudly about how membership of a professional body such as The Tutors’ Association “isn’t worth it” and how the process of acquiring a DBS check “isn’t necessary” either. For the record, my membership of The Tutors’ Association costs me just over £8 per month – that’s around the same amount that I pay for my Fellowship with the Chartered College of Teaching. (The latter, by the way, does not require me to update evidence of my criminal record check – The Tutors’ Association now does). The DBS update service – which renews my criminal record check every year – costs me just over £1 per month. Getting your first check done and getting onto the update service when you’re self-employed is a little more onerous and expensive at the outset, but that is something which The Tutors’ Association can do for you, as can a paid membership organisation such as Qualified Tutor. To be brutally frank, there is zero excuse for a tutor not to have invested in an enhanced DBS check if they are to call themselves a professional: if you’re currently paying a tutor who baulks at the question when you ask them, I would advise you to sever all ties with them immediately.

One of the things that has been most striking about the news reports has been people’s incredulity that these checks and legalities do not currently exist. So cushioned are we by the robust processes that do exist in vetting the adults that work with our children in schools, we perhaps tend to assume that this situation must apply to all walks of life. Do we forget that legislation does not control every single facet of our private lives? “I guess I kind of assumed there was some sort of protection in place,” said one parent interviewed by the BBC. In truth, if a parent employs a private tutor without researching their credentials, they are inviting a random stranger to work with their child.

It is perfectly legal to market oneself as a tutor with no relevant qualifications – be they in one’s subject or in teaching or education – and it is also legal to do so without a criminal record check. Finally, and this is what will upset and shock people the most, it is legal for a person to do so if they have already been convicted of offences that would disbar them from working in a school. The BBC investigation found that, over the past 20 years in the UK, 92 working private tutors have been convicted of sexual offences involving children. The figures, which the BBC obtained by combing through newspaper reports and court filings, are very likely to be an underestimate.

It is often said that an enhanced DBS check is the bare minimum that anyone working professionally with children should have, and I completely agree. All a DBS certificate proves is that the holder of the certificate has no prior convictions for a crime that would disbar them from working with children in a school or through other official services (social services, the police etc). Nothing more, nothing less than that. Beyond that basic minimum check for prior convictions, it relies again on the professionalism of the tutor to ensure that their own knowledge and understanding is up-to-date, both when it comes to their own professional knowledge and when it comes to safeguarding. I was privileged last week to attend the in-person safeguarding training held at the school in which I used to work. I am a regular visitor to the school, so it’s good for them that I was a part of this training and it’s good for me too. It keeps me informed and supplements the regular training that I keep up with online, which is detailed on my website under safeguarding.

I would appeal to all those employing the private services of a tutor to do their due diligence and ensure that anyone they employ to work with their children is – as a bare minimum – in possession of an up-to-date criminal record check. Personally, I would also ask them what safeguarding training they have undertaken within the last two years. Can they evidence it? Beyond that, I would also quiz them about what relevant and direct experience they have with the specific qualification they are claiming to be able to help my child with. Because believe you me, there are an awful lot of cowboys out there.

John Nichols, President of The Tutors Association, on BBC breakfast last week

Mobile madness

Supermarkets are really good at making things go viral these days. Who didn’t love the image of a whole shelf full of wine bottles labelled “office essentials” during the height of PartyGate? They know how to push people’s buttons on social media in order to keep their brand in the spotlight.

One can only assume that the potential to go viral was the purpose of this display, photographed and shared by an MFL teacher called David on Twitter this weekend:

Predictably, and presumably as part of Tesco’s dastardly plan to go viral, EduTwitter went beserk. Huge numbers of us, myself included, were pretty annoyed about the fact that Tesco were depicting a mobile phone as an “essential” for children heading into school. Yet this notion is not an outlier and Tesco certainly did not come up with it on their own; I am reliably informed by multiple friends who are parents that it is now considered to be a “rite of passage” for children to receive a smart phone when they enter secondary school (if their parents haven’t caved in already), so Tesco know what they’re doing here.

There is overhwhelming evidence that mobile phones cause problems in a school environment, which is why so many schools have moved towards banning them in recent years. Many teachers have expressed growing concerns that smart phones pose a significant safeguarding threat and a tool which aids and abets bullying and child-on-child abuse. This is now well-evidenced. Most fundamentally of all however – given that schools are meant to be a place where children learn – the basic problem with smart phones is that they are weapons of mass distraction.

A blogpost by Innerdrive sums up the research evidence on mobile phone usage in schools and it makes for sobering reading. While much of the research focuses on the usefulness of banning phones in a school setting, there is also a great deal of evidence which should give parents serious pause for thought about their child’s usage of devices at home, particularly at night-time. In summary: please don’t let your child have access to their phone after bedtime and please make sure that you have access to everything your child is doing and seeing online and that you check this regularly.

What has puzzled me most in this whole thing is the number of people still willing to defend the notion of children having access to these devices throughout the school day. Unsurprisingly, not very many of them are classroom teachers. They are “educators”, EdTech pushers or – occasionally – much-loved children’s poets. Most teachers have been concerned about children’s usage of smart phones from day one, and those who have defended the notion in the past have in many cases shifted their viewpoint. One of the most irksome arguments used against banning phones in schools is the viewpoint that children must be educated in their usage and that banning them is part of schools being “out of touch” with the modern world. Okay. Apply that argument to sex education: children should be allowed to experiment with sex in school because they need to be taught how to do it responsibly. Apply the argument to alcohol and drug usage: children should be allowed to use alcohol and drugs in school so that we can teach them how to do so responsibly. And so on. Of course students need to be taught about responsible internet usage and the dangers of social media, and believe you me they get this by the bucket-load. But to suggest that in order to learn about the use of smart phones they need to have ready access to these devices in school (as if somehow otherwise they wouldn’t know what we’re talking about?) is laughable.

One of my earliest shows for Teachers’ Talk Radio explored the relationship that teenagers have with their smart phones and my guest, Dr. Kathy Weston from Tooled Up Education, used the phrase “digital hygiene” to summarise the kinds of discussions and agreements that should go on between parents and their child at the point when a child is given one of these devices. It’s important to note where the responsibility lies here: with the parents who, after all, are paying the bill. Of course schools should be addressing mobile phone usage as a part of their PSHE programme, and I cannot imagine there is a school in the land not doing so. But dealing with this issue in schools is a dismal attempt to hang a sheet over a door that a horse has not only bolted through but slammed so hard that the door is off its hinges. In my show I also interviewed Matt Crowley, lead DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) in the school in which I was working at the time; the serious safeguarding risks and the systemic damage to a child’s mental health, self-esteem and personal safety which can arise from the use of these devices – in school and beyond – simply cannot be over-emphasised, I’m afraid.

Defenders of the smart phone in schools piont to its “education benefits” and there is no question that there are multiple apps that children can make use of in their learning journey. However, it is a full-time job to micro-manage this kind of usage and that can only be done by a parent or carer. If only we could trust all of our children to make use of their phones to access their Latin vocabulary on Quizlet during break and lunchtimes! In reality, anyone who thinks that’s what they are doing with them is seriously deluded. During the period in which smart phones had become endemic amongst young people when I was working in schools, I knew of numerous cases of children accessing pornography and videos produced by terrorist organisations; I knew of cases in which these devices were used for horrific and systemic bullying, to film teachers and humiliate them on social media, and for children to watch age-inappropriate films and play age-inappropriate games. You name it, I’m afraid they’ve probably done it and done it in school. Is that what people want for their child?

So schools must hold the line and maintain their ban – not that I know of a single one that regrets it – and parents can (I hope) take inspiration from it. These devices are wondrous and I fully admit that I could not live without mine. I first attained a smartphone at the age of around 35, which is probably responsible enough. I cannot tell you how glad I am that they did not exist when I was a child.

My final thought brings me back to my new full-time role, as a professional tutor. It is a discussion I have had to have with numerous parents, advising them to take away a child’s mobile phone while they access my sessions. Working online, it is particularly difficult to spot when a child is distracted by their device, but I can still spot it. Most children find it too difficult to discipline themselves not to look at their phones whilst they’re doing anything (even something they enjoy!) so the odds of them being able to resist it during a tutoring session are vanishingly slim. So take control, which means take the device. They’ll thank you for it one day.