Safeguarding Handover: What an Interim Leader Must Check in Week One

A practical week one guide for interim headteachers and senior leaders

Everything else in an interim placement can wait a fortnight. This can’t.

When a school loses its leader, safeguarding is the function most likely to have a gap in it, and the gap is rarely obvious. Records look fine. A designated safeguarding lead is named on the poster. The policy is current. And underneath that, three cases haven’t been reviewed since October and nobody has told the deputy DSL that they’re now the person.

Many interim leaders tell us the thing they wished they’d done differently was ask harder questions in week one. It’s understandable that a new arrival wants to build relationships before probing, but safeguarding is the one area where that instinct has to be set aside.

This is a working shape for the first five days.

Day one: who is the designated safeguarding lead?

Ask the question directly, and then ask three follow ups.

Does that person know they hold it? If your predecessor was the DSL and left on Friday, someone may be named on a document without having been told they’re now doing the job.

Do they have current training for the role? DSL training isn’t the same as general safeguarding training, and if the departing head held the role, the deputy may never have had it. If that’s the position, arrange DSL training this week rather than adding it to a list.

Do they have the time? A DSL with a full teaching timetable and no protected time is a name rather than a function.

Then ask a member of teaching staff and a member of support staff who the DSL is. If you get three different answers, that’s your first finding.

Days one to two: what is open right now?

Ask for a list of every open case. Not a summary, the list.

Go through it with the DSL and, for each one, establish what’s been done, what’s outstanding, who else is involved and when it was last reviewed. You’re looking for cases that have gone quiet, referrals made with no recorded response, and anything where the next step was somebody’s responsibility and that somebody has left.

Ask specifically about anything involving a member of staff, anything currently with the local authority designated officer, and anything a family has escalated. Those are the ones that carry the most risk and the ones most likely to have stalled during a leadership gap.

Ask when the last referral was made, and whether safeguarding supervision is happening for the staff carrying the heaviest cases. In a specialist setting with a vulnerable cohort, an unusually long gap since the last referral is worth understanding rather than reassuring.

Days two to three: low level concerns

This is the area where interim leaders most often find something, and it’s the area schools are least confident about.

Ask where low level concerns about adults are recorded, look at the record, and see how many entries there are. An empty log in a school of any size usually means concerns aren’t being captured rather than that none exist.

Then ask staff how they’d raise a concern about a colleague, and whether they’d feel able to. The answers to those two questions tell you more about safeguarding culture than any audit.

Look for patterns as well as entries. Several low level concerns about the same person, each individually minor, is precisely the picture the low level concerns process exists to surface.

Days three to four: the single central record

Look at it yourself. Don’t ask whether it’s up to date.

Check that everyone who works in the building is on it, including agency staff, contractors, therapists, volunteers and governors or trustees where relevant. Check the columns are genuinely completed rather than ticked. Check that anyone who’s started recently has a full set of entries.

Then check yourself. You should be on it, with the same checks as anyone else, and being an interim engaged through a provider changes nothing about that. If you’re not on it after a week, that tells you something about how the school runs and it’s a finding you have to include even though it’s about you.

A single central record audit is the fastest read available on whether a school’s safer recruitment practice is real or administrative.

Days four to five: ask people a long way from the DSL

The DSL will tell you how safeguarding is supposed to work. Everyone else will tell you how it actually works.

Talk to a teaching assistant, a member of the site team, a lunchtime supervisor, a therapist, someone who’s been at the school two months and someone who’s been there ten years. Ask what they’d do if they were worried about a child, what they’d do if they were worried about an adult, and whether anything has ever been raised that they felt wasn’t dealt with.

In a residential setting, do this on an evening shift. The picture at eight at night is frequently different from the picture at eleven in the morning, and it’s the more honest one.

Talk to the young people too, at whatever level they can manage. Do they know which adults they’d go to? Do they believe something would happen if they did?

The wider picture by the end of week one

By Friday you should be able to answer these.

Is the safeguarding policy current and does practice match it? When did staff last have safeguarding training, and does the record prove it? How are concerns about children recorded, and can you find a specific one quickly? Who attends multi agency meetings and what happens to the information afterwards? How does the school work with placing authorities and social workers, and are those relationships functioning?

You won’t have solved anything. You’ll know where you stand, which is what week one is for.

What if you find something serious?

Act on it immediately and follow the process rather than your instincts about the school.

If it concerns a member of staff, that goes to the local authority designated officer, and it goes there before anyone starts asking questions internally. If it concerns a child at risk of harm, it goes to children’s social care. If it concerns your proprietor or a board member, take external advice on who you report to before you report to them.

Tell the board what you’ve found and what you’ve done, in writing, on the day. An interim leader who discovers something serious and manages it quietly has made a difficult situation considerably worse.

Where what you find is systemic rather than a single case, an independent safeguarding audit gives the board an external, evidenced picture rather than relying on the word of someone who arrived a week ago.

From our experience

The most common finding isn’t a case that was handled badly. It’s a school where safeguarding is administered rather than led. Records are kept, referrals are made, training is logged, and nobody is looking across the whole picture asking what it adds up to.

Many interim leaders tell us the moment it became clear was asking a teaching assistant how they’d raise a concern about an adult, and watching them hesitate. That hesitation is data.

The second pattern is a deputy DSL who was never told they’d become the DSL. It happens more often than it should, and it’s the kind of thing that only surfaces when somebody new asks a direct question in their first week.

A common misconception

“I should build relationships before asking hard questions about safeguarding.”

It’s an understandable instinct and it’s the wrong way round. Staff are not offended by a new leader taking safeguarding seriously in week one. In our experience they’re reassured by it, because the people who care most about this are usually the ones who’ve been worrying quietly.

The relationships you build by asking properly in week one are stronger than the ones you’d have built by waiting. And the children in the school don’t have a settling in period available to them. They need the adult in charge to know what’s open on day two, not on day thirty.

Questions for interim leaders

• Does the named DSL know they hold the role, and do they have current training for it?
• Have I seen the open case list myself, every entry?
• Is the low level concerns record empty, and if so, why?
• Am I on the single central record?
• Have I asked someone who isn’t a senior leader how they’d raise a concern?

Our perspective

Week one is the only week in an interim placement where you can see a school clearly, before you’ve absorbed its assumptions about itself. Spend it on safeguarding.

Ask directly, look at the records yourself rather than accepting assurance, and talk to the people furthest from the leadership team. Write down what you find, including the parts that are uncomfortable, and give the board an honest account of it.

That’s the most valuable thing an interim leader does, and it’s the thing the children in the school most need from whoever has just walked through the door.