How To Use the Childsafe Guide

The Childsafe Guide for Organisations provides a framework for you to work through a valuable process that will help your organisation to develop a comprehensive child protection policy to keep children safe.  This tool will also help you to ensure that you manage risk for your organisation and protect your staff.

You may wish to print this page and keep it for reference as you are working through the process.  You may also want to print the various pages and topic sheets as you go.

How to use the Childsafe Guide for Organisations

This resource is broken into four sections to help step you through the process.

1. Organisation Health Check
   This section is a brief questionnaire that allows you to evaluate the sorts of processes and systems you currently have in place to keep children safe and manage risk in your organisation.
   
   Completing this questionnaire will help to identify where your organisation has gaps and how important it is for your organisation to work through this guide.
   
   
2. Plan and Prepare
   
   This section will help step you through some of the things that need to happen in your organisation to support you through the process of using this resource.
   
   It will help you to ensure the principles of your organisation support the process as well as helping you to put a structure in place for managing the process.
   
   
3. Develop Childsafe Policies
   

   This section is where you get down to the business of developing policies and procedures for your organisation to ensure that:

   • All people working in your organisation are safe to work with children
   • The practices of your organisation are focused on keeping children safe
   • All staff receive appropriate training to protect children

   The Policy Introduction section steps you through the information you should incluse as an introduction to your Child Protection Policy to set the context for the Child Protection Policy and any sub policies included within it.
   Each of the 3 sections (Childsafe People (3b), Childsafe Practices (3c) and Childsafe Training (3d)) are structured in the same way.

   • General information about why it is so important for your policy to cover the contents of that section.
   • A number of individual 'Topic Sheets' on specific topics that your child protection policy should cover.  

   Please note that each organisations child protection policy or policies may be formatted differently.  You may choose to have one comprehensive child protection policy containing a number of sections or you may prefer to have a number of separate policies tied together by the policy introduction.  However you choose to structure your policies, the important thing is that you have considered and documented the important topics relevant to keeping children safe.
   
   About Topic Sheets

   Each of the 3 sections (Childsafe People, Practices and Training) contains a number of individual Topic Sheets covering specific topics . The Topic Sheets are intended as guides for you to use to design your own policy on those specific topics.  The topic sheets can be worked through at your own speed.

   Each Topic Sheet has five sections to help you develop your own policies and procedures on the topic.
   
   Aim: The purpose of having a policy on this topic
    
   Sample Policy:  An example of what an organisations policy on this topic may look like.  A Policy Statement describes WHAT the agency or organisation believes in and will do.
   
   Sample Procedure:  Examples of what procedures for this topic might look like.  The Procedures describe HOW the organisation will go about following the policy.
   
   Issues:  Because the above procedures are just samples, they will not cover everything that needs to be considered within the topic. It is important that the organisation considers all the items listed and finds answers to them where necessary. These answers will then need to be translated into procedures.
   
   Notes:  This section provides other information or advice.

4. Monitor and Review
   
   Just as important as the process of working through this resource is making sure you have a long term plan to ensure that the policies and priocedures you develop are 'living documents' that are used regularly in your organisation and continue to reflect the actual principles and practices of your organisation. 

   As an additional tool to help you to keep track of where you are at in this process you may wish to print out this Childsafe Guide Checklist.