Wales National Safeguarding Week: What is Safeguarding and Why is it Important?

Wales National Safeguarding Week: What is Safeguarding and Why is it Important?

In our world of fostering safeguarding is at the heart of who we are, what we do, and why we do it but what is safeguarding and why is it necessary for everyone to know its importance?

When working with vulnerable children and young people safeguarding is always at the forefront of your mind but often it is overlooked or avoided by many outside of this career path. It can be easy to downplay a situation or choose not to get involved, ‘It’s got nothing to do with me’, but understanding the importance and value of choosing to take a stand can make a significant difference in the well-being of vulnerable people within our society.

What is safeguarding?

Safeguarding is a process that aims to protect vulnerable children and adults from harm, abuse, and neglect. It is a fundamental human right for individuals to live in safety, free from exploitation and abuse.

Every person should live their lives without harm, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, or religion. It’s important that every vulnerable child and adult is kept safe.

What our social workers had to say

Supervising Social Worker, Viv Potter - For me, safeguarding is about ensuring the physical and emotional safety of all young people in our care and providing placements where they all have this so they can meet their full potential and have a happy life 😊 For anyone interested in safeguarding I highly recommend the Wales Safeguarding procedures app. It means we can have easy access to safeguarding procedures whilst out and about with foster carers and is a great resource for foster carers to use too.

Safeguarding training

At Calon Cymru all of our foster carers and staff are required to undertake safeguarding training ensuring that we can identify a potential safeguarding issue and know how to respond to that. Our in-house trainer Gareth provides an extensive background in to safeguarding covering everything from policies and the law around safeguarding to more practical advice around identifying and escalating safeguarding issues. Gareth’s background in social work makes him a passionate advocate for people taking responsibility for safeguarding.

‘It is everyone’s responsibility to safeguard vulnerable people in our communities. There is no doubt that it can feel scary to raise an issue to the authorities and have that ‘what if I am wrong?’ in the back of your mind, but what if you’re right? People in a vulnerable position need people to stand up for them, young children might not understand that their situation is not right and never disclose that information to a responsible adult in their lives. Your intervention could be the missing piece of the puzzle in determining whether authorities act and remove a vulnerable person from a dangerous environment.’