Building Better Futures: Schools Safeguarding Summit – 24 September 2023
Guided by world experts, The Bangladesh Safeguarding Summit seeks to achieve three things – commitment to international safeguarding standards, appointing designated safeguarding leads in their schools and sharing best practices across the school network
Next month will see a big event for the country's children: The Bangladesh Safeguarding Summit. Organised by the British Council, schools are coming together to embrace the latest international safeguarding standards.
Guided by world experts, the summit will seek to achieve three things: Commitment to international safeguarding standards, appointing designated safeguarding leads in their schools and sharing best practices across the school network.
Giving a new level of reassurance, it acknowledges that this core issue is part of a larger global challenge, making it a dynamic concern.
Safeguarding: The global challenge
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UNICEF envisions a world where all children are free from violence, exploitation and neglect. It has three key aims: for all children to grow in a protective environment, for children at risk to receive targeted support and for violated children to be helped (source: UNICEF Child Protection Strategy 2021-30).
With decades of progress under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, recent world trends are worrying, as Covid-19 has had significant adverse impacts on children's education and safety.
UNICEF reports that 1.2 billion children live in countries with complex emergencies; 34 million children are displaced by natural disasters, putting them at risk of violence, exploitation and abuse; one in 10 children are in child labour with 79 million in hazardous work.
Violence against children is significant with 1 billion children experiencing physical, emotional or sexual violence yearly. Whilst the scale of global statistics is shocking, the specific situation of safeguarding in schools is equally distressing.
Safeguarding our students
The snapshot of safeguarding globally shows that 150 million students suffer peer-to-peer violence, and a staggering 720 million live in countries with no legal protection from adult violence at school. The practice of caning children continues to be a violent method of control in schools worldwide (source: UNICEF, 2021).
Despite this backdrop, schools are places of safety for children, keeping the vulnerable away from exploitation and violence. Covid-19 lockdowns exposed many to violence, child marriage or child labour (source: UNICEF, Global Annual Results 2021). Given this, keeping children safe from abuse remains a central child protection focus.
Safeguarding in schools subsumes child protection and encompasses governance and leadership, policies and procedures, reporting and referring, risk audits and registers, safer recruitment, case management, and safety and security – all of which help create a culture of safeguarding.
With developments in digital learning and a broader interest in holistic education, safeguarding students covers all educational activities within and beyond school.
Shaped by the present
Statutory advances (under the Equality Act 2010 and the Children & Families Act 2014) have made much progress in Bangladesh, alongside significant examples of best practices in NGOs and leading businesses.
UNICEF has impressive evidence of action in Bangladesh against a very challenging backdrop, as its recent data highlights:
| Children (under 5 years) whose births are registered | 56% |
| Women (20-24 years) married or in union before 18 years | 51% |
| Children (5-17 years) engaged in child labour | 7% |
| Children (1-14 years) who experienced physical punishment and/or psychological aggression by caregivers | 89% |
Source: UNICEF, 2022
There is still much to do. With 44% of unregistered births, there are millions of missing children, unidentified and under any safeguarding radar. This creates issues for tracking their progress and performance in education, health and wellbeing.
Around half of children with disabilities do not go to school, depriving them of education, and social interaction and imposing a life of loneliness (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2023). Only 35% of disabled children are enrolled in secondary school; those who do attend school have a two-year academic lag. These deprivations are safeguarding issues.
UNICEF reports that nine out of 10 children have suffered physical or psychological punishment by parents and teachers, and millions have been subject to abuse, violence and exploitation. Young people are married off prematurely or sent to work at an early age as a family survival strategy.
UNICEF estimates around 7% of 5-17-year-olds have been child labourers, often in hazardous contexts, and there is a backlog of 23,000 legal cases involving children jammed up in the justice system.
Achieving impact now
Our long-term aim is to build safe, happy and successful schools to meet the country's evolving needs. Collaboration between the public and private spheres is key to meeting this ambition.
With safeguarding, there must be an urgency to our actions, with haste to make things happen now. Setting an agreed standard for safeguarding protects children now as it also builds a better future. This is what the British Council Safeguarding Summit can achieve.
Safeguarding specialists are doing life-changing work with the means to achieve positive outcomes in months, not years. The Safeguarding Alliance has worked with governments and school systems globally to build country-specific national safeguarding systems. The aim is to get things in place at pace, using a four-stage framework and taking advice from these world experts at the forthcoming Safeguarding Summit.
First comes the need for an environmental scan of safeguarding in schools in Bangladesh, a statistically significant picture of cultural awareness of safeguarding. This leads to a national framework for Keeping Children Safe in Bangladesh (KCSIB) and a national safeguarding policy.
Such a policy is grounded in resources for school use. Lastly comes the roll-out of the policy, initially on a pilot basis, to build a secure national safeguarding inspection system with its training section.
Given the complexities of the education landscape, building such a system at scale needs a build-operate-transfer model. Training the trainer is key, to creating a contextual grasp of safeguarding and its standards and to effect proven implementation strategies (source: The Safeguarding Alliance).
My school, Haileybury Bhaluka, will play its part in sharing strong practices, acting as a hub to support other schools across all sectors. Collaborative approaches to raise safeguarding standards are imperative.
The short-term impact of private-public partnerships can complement the long-term success of a national safeguarding system. These partnerships must have critical pillars to create a culture of safeguarding: setting the standards with governors, owners and school leaders, producing policies and procedures that work in context, using case studies to shape practices for recruitment, reporting and referrals and creating an understanding of risk in education contexts via risk audits and registers.
In building better futures, we move forward together.
Simon O'Grady is the Founding Headmaster of Haileybury Bhaluka. A long-standing board member of The Council of British International Schools, he shaped safeguarding standards worldwide and has advised the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre, UK.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.
