WHAT IS and IS NOT SAFEGUARDING?

A. RESOURCES

Diocesan Safeguarding teams provide a wide variety of services to their individual dioceses. We have found a wide spread in both staffing and provision of service across dioceses, with no discernible pattern relating to worshipping community numbers, diocesan finances or geographical area.

This chart shows diocesan resources plotted against Usual Sunday Attendance (10,000s)

This chart plots Resource against Diocesan Income (for which we had fewer data points)

And this chart plots Resource against Geographical Area

This variation in resources may, and we only have a few data points, relate to the scope of the services provided in a given diocese. In no particular order, these are a typical list:

1. Provision of outline policies and procedures for parishes, etc., to adopt

2. Provision of Safeguarding Training

3. A graded scheme for parishes, etc., to aspire to from basic to 'gold' standard

4. Advice on safeguarding related matters

5. An out-of-hours service for advice and reporting

6. Investigation of serious reports

7. Liaison with statutory authorities on Safeguarding matters

B. SCOPE

We have not. as yet, had any official feedback from Diocesan Teams, and very few of them publish data about their activity, but we are grateful to those who do publish and to those who have unofficially shared their experiences. The following is based on the limited evidence we have and we recognise that it is not statistically significant. We would welcome more data.

We identified three views of church Safeguarding:

1. Volunteers attending Safeguarding Training learn that Safeguarding encompasses a very wide field of concerns and involves the whole community, not just the church.

2. The Media teaches the Public that church Safeguarding (or lack thereof) is primarily about sexual or spiritual/financial abuse committed by church workers. Additionally, these typically relate to non-recent concerns.

3. The organisation of the church seeks to deliver training and support to parishes, etc.

The data we have is that the first category comprises the bulk of concern cases referred to Diocesan teams.

In dioceses with more affluent congregations, bullying and harassment complaints form the majority of reports. In other dioceses, domestic abuse cases predominate. We would argue that the former are primarily 'management' issues, best dealt with through the local structures, even though we recognise that these are hopelessly inadequate in most areas. The domestic and related abuse cases are where the church is continuing the its work down the centuries, though now supporting the overburdened statutory agencies created to take that work away from charity based initiatives. To continue these types of work locally makes sense, though whether it is appropriate to do it as a Safeguarding Team is questionable as both are sticking plasters over other problems.

The second category is what the Media and Public believe we need to "get a grip of." and is the primary focus of our proposal. We also note that most of those that make it into the press are non-recent, both as events and as church investigations. IN our limited data samples, we have only one case per diocese per year of an investigation leading to a DBS referral. This of course does not include cases referred to statutory authorities for investigation.

Support of the parishes and individuals seeking advice or to raise a concern is highly variable. Anyone visiting the Scouts website will find this on the front page:

A one-stop portal for raising concerns or obtaining advice. It could be better but let's look at what you find if you visit the Church of England website:

It's a menu item on the left in very small print. Clicking on it takes you to another page, in which there's a box to click: "Report a Concern and Finding Support". Let's click that:

So now we have to click on a link to take us to a map, where we first have to fill in a postcode. You think you then have to click on "Find My Location" but that only repeats the postcode search. No, what you have to do is click on the area of the map where your postcode shows up. That then produces this:

By now, most distressed people will be in a heap on the floor. But perhaps a kind friend will click the link for them. Now, Chelmsford happens to be one of the better sites in the country but even here, you'll then have another two pages to work through before getting to a number.

C INTERIM CONCLUSIONS

1. We need the input of the diocesan and national teams to understand the actual workloads across the whole church.

2. The disparity in resources across dioceses points to a lack of consistency and potential "reinventing the wheel". We can see no reason for policy and procedure development or training development to be conducted other than at National level, though with an open door to suggestions for improvement.

3. A single point of contact for reporting concerns or obtaining advice is a priority. The lack of consistency and the difficulty of obtaining information cannot continue.

4. It is likely that the resource required to provide support outside of the dioceses is going to be relatively low, given the (very limited) information we have on workloads in the diocesan teams.