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Today's post is in response to a lecturer who has requested information on safeguarding children. Hopefully this will be of use to all students, but if you're doing the 2nd year of the FdA Early Years course then you may want to pay particular attention...

You could do worse than start by looking at the section of the Every Child Matters website which deals with the Common Assessment Framework; here you will find links to various documents and training materials which will hopefully prove to be useful. You may also want to take a look at the 2006 report Working Together to Safeguard Children which takes a detailed look at various aspects of the safeguarding process.

Other reports take a different angle towards safeguarding issues; to find out what children themselves have to say on the matter, try looking at Children and Safeguarding which was published last year. Last year also saw the appearance of the lengthily-titled Understanding the Contribution of Sure Start Local Programmes to the Task of Safeguarding Children’s Welfare, while a number of documents on safeguarding children in educational settings are available from the DCSF website. A further good source for materials on safeguarding and all aspects of child protection is NSPCC Inform, which contains the full text of many reports and pieces of research in this area.

To bring us up to date, you may want to take a look at Tim Gill's report No Fear, which caused something of a stir when it appeared towards the end of last year. Recent weeks have also seen the publication of the government's Staying Safe Action Plan and the Becta report Safeguarding Children in a Digital World (you'll need to click on this link then click on the 'download' link on the page that appears).

If you're interested in a particular case relating to safeguarding children, then you may want to access Childlink via Athens, as this brings together news and reports on a number of 'featured cases' (eg Victoria Climbie). You may also want to have a look at the new CCInform service which the College has just begun subscribing to (details to follow in tomorrow's blog post). A number of journals which should be useful are also available in the library - Children & Society and Child Welfare are just two of these.