Blog – Latest stories tagged 'staff_training'

Register now to take the bullying awareness online training from TrainingSchoolz

As the latest academic year began, figures released by The Diana Award revealed that 57% of young people have been bullied at some point in their school lives. And 35% of those bullied had missed school as a result. In addition, the figures also revealed that 36% of parents are worried that their child has behaved in a bullying manner.

As we know, the 'Keeping Children Safe in Education' guidance from the DfE asserts that "safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is everyone's responsibility", and of course, bullying, or more specifically bullying prevention is a significant element of this.

This is why we are delighted to offer you access to free bullying awareness training from our sister site, TrainingSchoolz.

This training is designed to support schools in their understanding of policies and procedures around the different ways in which children and young people can be bullied. It covers good practice on how schools should address the issues of bullying.

The training is available free of charge for staff to complete from now until 15th November - to coincide with anti-bullying week which takes place from 11th - 15th November.

Sign-up now to complete the training

Free Data Protection (GDPR) refresher training for Safeguarding Essentials members Click here to find out more and register

This time last year, there was one word (or should I say acronym) that was never far from the conversation - GDPR!

We all had the date firmly embedded in our minds and we all received training on how the 25th May changes would affect us.

The DfE issued a Data Protection for Schools Toolkit, highlighting guidance in the form of nine steps schools could take to efficiently develop the culture, processes and documentation required to be compliant with the strengthened legislation to effectively manage the risks associated with data management. This nine-step guide is still available in the form of a 103-page document.

So, one year on, is GDPR done and dusted?

The definite answer to that is no. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law came into force during 2018 along with the updated Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). But what is the difference between GDPR and Data Protection?

GDPR is the new European law that is the change of a generation. It defines the data subject as the ultimate owner of their personal data, with specific rights, and any organisation, public or private, which processes personal data must have a legal basis to do so.

In addition to this, each country was required to create a local law to ratify the exemptions allowed for their industries and culture. In the UK, this is covered by the Data Protection Act 2018.

Many schools just use the term "data protection" as this is a common title to both laws.

During the early part of 2018, schools took the opportunity to train staff on the changes that were then about to take place. However, 12 months on, many staff members are now due to have that training refreshed.

TrainingSchoolz, a sister company of Safeguarding Essentials, is helping schools manage their refresher training by offering free Data Protection/GDPR online training to all Safeguarding Free, Safeguarding Essentials and E-safety Support members for a limited time. Offer ends Easter!

Schools can register to take the GDPR training and invite up to 300 of their peers to take the course for free as well have access to the simple-to-use yet powerful platform developed specifically for the education sector. Click here to find out more and register or call 0113 360 7838 for further information.

Could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution to staff training?

According to the recent ‘School Snapshot Survey’ report released by the DfE, “School leadership teams have been encouraged to prioritise the provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities for teaching staff”.

Despite this claim, 91% of teachers surveyed for the report stated that there were still barriers to accessing effective CPD. 70% of teachers cited cost as the most common obstacle, while over half (51%) felt that insufficient time was a contributing factor.

Of course, CPD is just one part of the training story: there is also all the mandatory training, from induction and health & safety to GDPR and Prevent, which must also be kept up to date.

The cost of training doesn’t just begin and end with the course itself. The school also has to add the cost of supply cover if the training takes place during school hours. In addition, when trained staff leave a school, any knowledge learnt goes with them, leaving the school with the expense of paying to re-train another member of the team.

Add to that the challenge of finding time in an already packed school timetable and the requirement to evidence statutory compliance and the training task can soon become inefficient and time-consuming.

So, could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution?

Yorkshire based ed-tech company, TrainingToolz believes so, and so do their customers. Their bespoke platform for schools, TrainingSchoolz is a simple-to-use yet powerful platform developed specifically for the education sector. It has all the features schools need to create effective training courses, as well as policies and other information for sharing, along with the functionality to distribute, track and audit responses efficiently.

Kim Edwards, Senior Premises and Compliance Officer at Aspire Academies Trust and West Hertfordshire Teaching School Partnership, commented, “TrainingSchoolz makes training the school community easy to manage. Online dashboards allow me to see quickly the percentage of users who have completed the training”.

Darren Rose, a consultant and trainer working with schools and councils across the UK added “Safeguarding and e-safety are at the heart of schools’ compliance. I, too, for my small part, use this very powerful platform to provide data protection training and compliance reporting for schools (SLT, staff & governors). I would strongly recommend it as a platform for other content creators as well as for schools to create their own content”.

The TrainingSchoolz platform allows schools to compile their own training and policy library easily, adding video, audio and downloadable documents to their courses. In addition, TrainingSchoolz also provides a bank of ready-made policies and training courses. The assignments have been professionally written by experts in their field and are designed to save schools time and money over authoring their own training in common areas. Each assignment in this Training Library is fully editable, so schools can tailor it to their needs or use it as it comes.

For schools who would like to find out more about the platform, TrainingSchoolz offers a free sign up, where schools can create their own training courses or policies, or pick one from the fully editable library. And with the 10 training sessions included in the free package, schools can fully test out the system by inviting staff to complete an assignment and see the results.

To find out more, visit www.TrainingSchoolz.com