Child Safe Standards

In my role as Child Safe Advocate, I have become familiar with the NSW Child Safe Standards. These standards were developed by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse based on their findings and research. The standards aim to help organisations that provide services and facilities for children to promote child safety and minimise risk of harm to children. In my role, I have looked into and conducted an audit on our policies and procedures here at St Mary's for Standard 1 and Standard 6.  With our added dependence on Internet communication and research, I would like to assure our school community of our efforts to ensure your children are safe when working online either through MS Teams or Google Classroom

The Royal Commission recommended the following 10 standards:

Standard 1: Child safety is embedded in institutional leadership, governance and culture
Standard 2: Children participate in decisions affecting them and are taken seriously
Standard 3: Families and communities are informed and involved
Standard 4: Equity is upheld and diverse needs are taken into account
Standard 5: People working with children are suitable and supported
Standard 6: Processes to respond to complaints of child sexual abuse are child focused
Standard 7: Staff are equipped with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children safe through continual education and training
Standard 8: Physical and online environments minimise the opportunity for abuse to occur
Standard 9: Implementation of the Child Safe Standards is continuously reviewed and improved
Standard 10: Policies and procedures document how the institution is child safe.

You can find out more about the child safe standards on the Royal Commission’s website.

Below is a resource NSW Office of the Children's Guardian has put together for online learning that lines up with Standard 8.

https://stmarysc.nsw.edu.au/_file/media/1475/standard_8_online_resource.pdf