Every organization working with children should have a safeguarding children policy in place to ensure their students are safe from physical, mental, or emotional abuse.
But mere policies are never enough since they are just a book in a drawer, not in the field. The teachers and those accompanying children in VET mobilities are tasked with bringing these policies to action.
VET organizations must ensure that their staff is always up to date on the latest safeguarding policies. For this reason, they need to train and retrain them constantly. This is the only way to ensure children’s safety and to keep their organization free from liabilities.
Apart from the necessary training, there are also tools to benchmark the status of children safeguarding inside organizations. One such tool is the VET Mobility Safeguarding Benchmarking Tool that we developed with our partners in the VET SQUARED project.
Let’s have a more thorough look at this tool.
What is the VET Safeguarding Benchmarking Tool
Organizations must abide by at least a minimum of safeguarding standards in VET. Having understood this, we developed a benchmarking tool for VET professionals to check how their organization performs in the safeguarding children policy.
This benchmarking complements the Safeguarding Quality Charter we developed with our partners earlier this year. The Safeguarding Charter details the minimum requirements VET needs to be considered safeguarding-focused.
Our new benchmarking tool will:
- Determine the status of children safeguarding in VET organizations
- Provide the steps to achieve the minimum requirements
How it can help safeguarding children
The tool portrays an organization’s compliance with the safeguarding children policy as its safeguarding footprint.
A diminishing footprint will mean that the organization is closer to meeting at least the minimum standards. An organization with an “excellent” safeguarding footprint will be able to download a certificate of excellence.
This is a perfect opportunity for VET organizations to receive a distinction for their services. They can capitalize on it by promoting it through their channels as providers of a safe environment for children learning.
Children are vulnerable. We have to do our best to keep them safe from harm at all costs. This benchmarking tool will ensure our children’s safety, keep their learning opportunities high, and save VET organizations from a lot of stress.
Say tuned to keep up with all updates from the VET SQUARED project and learn more about safeguarding children.
