Blog – Latest stories tagged '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

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

Only 68% of schools reported that all staff are receiving regular e-safety training and updates.

In 2012, Ofsted released their inspecting e-safety briefing, placing an emphasis on educating young people about staying safe online, while providing a safe environment in which to explore the web.

In the six years that have followed, a great deal has changed, not least the available technology and indeed how young people are connecting to the virtual and online world.

From a school perspective, the greatest change has come in the form of responsibility. Gone are the days when e-safety was considered the domain of the IT teacher – now the responsibility lies with the senior management team in the form of a designated safeguarding lead.

To that end, e-safety is no-longer a separate entity but is incorporated in the DfE guidance relating to the wider safeguarding issues, primarily set out the in the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance, which was updated at the beginning of September.

One of the key elements of the guidance is that of staff training, with the KCSIE stating that:

Governing bodies and proprietors should ensure that all staff undergo safeguarding and child protection training (including online safety) at induction. The training should be regularly updated.
And
In addition, all staff should receive regular safeguarding and child protection updates (for example, via email, e-bulletins, staff meetings) as required, and at least annually, to provide them with relevant skills and knowledge to safeguard children effectively.

To underline this requirement the “Inspecting safeguarding in early years, education and skills settings” Ofsted guidance issued earlier this month advises inspections to include evidence that:

staff, leaders, governors and supervisory bodies (where appropriate) and volunteers receive appropriate training on safeguarding at induction, that is updated regularly.

However, it seems that many schools are currently not providing adequate staff training on internet safety. According to figures extracted from the E-safety Support e-safety checklist, in the 2017/18 academic year, only 67.8% of users who logged progress in this area reported that they were fulfilling this requirement.

In addition, less than half (48.2%) of governing bodies were considered to be is involved the e-safety policy and practice within schools, while only 59% of users reported having an effective e-safety policy in place.

With the safeguarding remit ever widening, it’s not hard to understand why some schools may not be meeting the DfE requirements for e-safety – budgets, time and the expanding areas of risk which need to be considered make the safeguarding arena a challenging one to keep up with. However, we must remember that “Early years settings, schools, and further education and skills institutions should be safe environments where children (that is, everyone under the age of 18), learners and vulnerable adults can learn and develop” and having trained staff is essential to ensuring this is the case.

Online e-safety training available from Safeguarding Essentials

Our online training courses are simple to distribute and monitor. They are a cost effective way to make sure your whole school community receives regular up-to-date training. With no 'per-user' costs, you can distribute the training to as many staff, parents, governors and pupils as you need and can repeat the training as often as necessary.

There are currently 13 online training courses for staff covering a range of safeguarding topics - a full list of courses can be viewed here

Review your e-safety provision with our interactive online checklist

The statistics quoted are taken from our interactive online e-safety checklist, which is available to all Safeguarding Essentials members. The 9 point checklist gives you an outline of the necessary action or procedure that needs to take place in your school, with references to additional information and support if you need them. Find out more

Subsidised memberships available

Since 2013, we have been supporting schools across the UK and beyond to deliver consistent, outstanding practice in online safety. Recently, we have added resources to our service to address wider safeguarding requirements. To date, our online training has been completed over 130,000 times.

However, we recognise that some of the schools who need the greatest support are those with the least resource. That’s why we have teamed up with our partners at Friendly WiFi to offer subsidised membership to those most in need - up to 100% discounts are available to qualifying schools. Discover your discount now!