The National Safeguarding Team has produced some guidance for the Church of England on questions that arise because of the situation we are all now in. It can be found here. Please make yourselves aware of this guidance and the additional points below:
- Firstly, the main thing to remember is that our responsibilities to report safeguarding concerns remain as they were. The Diocesan Safeguarding team is working remotely and can be contacted via email using a new email address, safeguarding@chichester.anglican.org. In addition, please make yourselves aware of the ‘What Do I Do If?’ section of the Diocesan safeguarding website here.
- With regards to DBS checks, please see the guidance from the NST and make yourselves aware of the interim government guidance linked from that document. Licensed clergy DBS checks are still being done by the safeguarding team and should not be done locally, but clergy can scan ID documents in and send them to Kim who can then view them with you remotely over video link, as per the government interim guidance. For PTO clergy, we are continuing to process the applications that were already in the system but for workload reasons will not currently be processing new applications.
- With regards to training, online Basic (C0) and Foundation (C1) training is still available here. That training should still be completed as usual. For Leadership training (C2), that has been cancelled at the moment for the obvious reasons. The National Safeguarding Team has agreed that the current situation constitutes a cogent reason for clergy and other officers who need this training to disregard the need to renew it every 3 years for as long as this situation continues. For clergy in particular, please don’t email the team to ask whether you need to renew your Leadership training or not: we hold that information centrally and will get in touch with you about this when the current restrictions have been lifted and we can organise training events again. Finally, for everyone, please remember that you only need to renew the highest level of training that you have.