Concern Reports#
Concern reports are the way to record safeguarding concerns regarding students at the school. They allow you to electronically track all of the details about a given concern for it’s lifetime. This includes any additional comments from staff as the concern report is investigated, a record of the contact made to various agencies and parent/guardians as well as the interventions for students resulting from the investigation into each concern.
All users are able to report a concern for the school to investigate ensuring that all concerns are easily brought to the attention of the safeguarding team at the school.
Senior leaders at the school can then analyse data and report on progress with regard to safeguarding concerns across the school. This helps to ensure you’re meeting your legal requirements when it comes to safeguarding the student’s in your school.
Reporting a Concern#
Any user can report a new concern to the school by clicking the Report a Concern option from the Safeguarding section of the Hub side bar. This will open the report a concern form.
You’ll need to provide the date of concern, the concern type and the detail about the concern. When reporting the date of concern you should enter the most accurate date possible, either when you saw the event happen or the date you were told it happened. You should enter as much detail as possible in the detail section to ensure the school have all of the required information to investigate the concern and take appropriate action. Please be sure to enter the student name(s) and form or year group(s) if you know these as well as this will help the school when investigating.
Tip
As a staff member at the school you’ll be able to select the students from a dropdown list as you can in the other areas of the system. Unfortunately due to data privacy requirements we can’t display a dropdown list students at the school to other types of user. If you’re not a staff member at the school you’ll have to enter the details of the student into the detail field.
When you’ve entered all the information click the submit button to send the report to the school. You’ll be shown a confirmation message when it’s been submitted to confirm it was successfully sent.
Once you report the concern then safeguarding team at the school will investigate the claim in the report and take appropriate action. If the team need additional information about the concern they will contact you as required.
Tip
Unfortunately you won’t be able to check on the status of a concern report with the school as the information relating to it’s progress and interventions is highly sensitive and cannot be shared. We are grateful that you reported the concern and rest assured any appropriate actions will be taken.
Reviewing an Initial Report#
When a new concern report is sent to the school by a user you’ll first need to the review the report. You can see which reports are awaiting review by clicking the Review Initial Reports option from the Concern Reports section of the Safeguarding side bar. This will show all reports awaiting review.
Tip
Users configured in the Concern Report Initial Reviewer Notification Group app setting will receive a notification letting them know a new report was filed and is awaiting review.
Select the report that you want to review by clicking the corresponding view button. This will open the initial review page.
You’ll need to review the report and check that the details are appropriate, select the student(s) and apply the relevant area(s) of concern. You should take this opportunity to check if the report looks suspicious. For example, does it look like a student is reporting a concern about another student as a form of bullying or the report is clear fabrication. It’s up to you to make this determination. If you think it’s a genuine report, accept it and proceed to investigate. Otherwise reject the report and it will be stored in the list of rejected reports.
You’ll also be able to see the person that filed the concern report. The system automatically tracks the user that submitted the report so that the safeguarding team know who to contact if additional information is required.
Once you’ve reviewed the information you can choose to accept or reject the report by using the buttons at the top of the page. You’ll be redirected to the edit page for the report where you can perform other actions.
Tip
Once the report is accepted the student’s assigned safeguarding lead will be sent a notification letting them know there was a new report and the student’s activity feed will be updated with an entry saying “A new safeguarding concern report was created.” (This is intentionally vague so as not to leak sensitive information to the wider school population).
Important
Once a report is rejected a notification is sent to the users configured in the Concern Report Rejected Notification Group app setting. This notification asks the user(s) to double check that the rejection was appropriate and protects against the unlikely event that the person rejecting the report was the subject of the concern and is attempting to maliciously “hide” the concern from the school. While this is unlikely we think it’s important to protect against this eventuality in the best interests of safeguarding the students at the school.
Concern Report Details#
One the edit screen you’ll be able to see all of the details of the concern report. You can update the details as required. The information includes:
Date of Concern - The date the concern was noticed or took place.
Concern Type - The concern type of this concern report.
Areas of Concern - The areas of concern that are relevant for this concern report. These can be used to categorise concern reports for analytics and keeping staff informed.
Detail - The detail of the concern that is being reported.
CC Staff Members#
This is the mechanism by which additional staff within the school are made aware of concern reports relating to student’s that they have a particular interest in. Certain staff members are automatically copied in as you complete additional sections of the report.
Automatic CC Staff Member Inclusions#
As you complete sections of the concern report additional staff members may be automatically included in the CC Staff Members section. Each of these staff members will be automatically selected and cannot be removed from the concern report, the reason for each staff member being included is shown next to their name.
When selecting a student their assigned safeguarding lead will be added.
When selecting a concern type the school may have configured a set of staff members to be included.
When selecting areas of concern the school may have configured a set of staff members to be included.
When adding interventions the school may have configured a set of staff members to be included.
The school may have configured the app settings to automatically include additional staff members.
Statuses#
A concern report has a status assigned to it showing where it is in the workflow for a report. The possible statuses for a report are:
Initial Report - Reports are set to this status when they’re first reported by a user and are awaiting investigation by the school.
Intervention Pending - Reports are set to this status automatically when they are accepted by the school after their initial review.
Rejected - Reports are set to this status automatically when they are rejected by the school after their initial review.
Closed - Reports are set to this after they’ve been investigated by the school and had their interventions assigned.
Students#
At least one student must be selected. Each student is automatically assigned to the “Victim” role when being added, if their involvement differs from this you’ll need to select the option that accurately represents it.
You can remove a student by clicking the corresponding delete icon, you’ll be asked to confirm the action before the student is deleted. (Deleting a student from a concern report will also delete any assigned interventions and contact record entries for that student)
Tip
You can open a students dashboard in a new tab by clicking the corresponding students dashboard button. This allows you to easily check up on other relevant items such as student contacts.
Interventions#
A concern report intervention is the resulting action from an investigation. It relates to a single student. Each student can be assigned one, many or no interventions from an investigation.
Tip
If the student has a role of “Victim” or “Subject” then they must have at least one intervention assigned.
The school can configure it’s desired set of interventions to allow the process to be customised to your workflow.
Tip
You cannot close a concern report until at least one intervention has been assigned to each of the students with the “Victim” or “Subject” roles and that intervention is complete.
To add an intervention, click the Add Intervention(s) button and select the intervention you wish to add.
You’ll then be shown a window where you can add the details of the intervention and select the student(s) it applies to. A default intervention will have a detail section allowing you to record information associated to the intervention if desired.
Tip
If the intervention requires that it is manually completed you’ll need to mark them all as completed before the report can be closed.
To remove an intervention from a student you can click the delete icon from the corresponding student’s intervention. You’ll be asked to confirm the action before the intervention is deleted.
Contact Record#
The contact record section allows staff to record any contact that’s been carried out in relation to each student. This record of contact is automatically stored with the concern report so that all information is held together.
To add a new record of contact, click the add Add Contact Record Entry button in the corresponding student’s card. You will see a new popup window where you can enter all of the desired information about the contact.
Once complete, click the Add Contact Record Entry button at the bottom of the window. The new record will appear in the student’s card.
If you’ve got permission, you’ll be able to delete the contact records if they were added accidentally. When clicking delete you’ll be asked to confirm the deletion before the record is deleted.
Referrals#
The referrals section shows you a record of who has been responsible for this concern report for it’s lifetime. You can see details of:
Who was referred the report.
When it was referred to them.
Why it was referred to them.
As the current owner, you can make a new referral request to refer the concern report to another member of staff. To add a new request, click the add button. This will open a new popup window where you can enter all of the desired information about the referral. You must select the referee you’d like to be responsible for the report and provide text explaining why you want them to take ownership. Click save once you’ve entered all of the information.
The referee will receive a notification letting them know about the new referral request, they can click this to be taken to the concern report. They must then choose to either accept the report and become the owner or reject the referral. When rejecting the referral they must provide a reason that they are rejecting the request allowing a full audit trail to be kept.
All information about this history of requests, details, rejections and their details is stored and available as part of the concern report.
Closing a Concern Report#
Concern reports are never closed automatically. The school are responsible for investigating the concern and closing the report when the investigation is complete and any interventions are assigned.
The close button is displayed at the top of the page. It’s disabled if you still need to resolve an issue in the concern report. If the button is disabled you will see a yellow bar showing further details about what you need to do to complete the concern report.
The common reasons for a concern report not being closable are:
The concern report contains incomplete interventions that require manual completion.
You’ll need to update the interventions completion status to close these reports.
The concern report contains students with a role of “Victim” or “Subject” that have no interventions assigned.
You’ll need to add at least one intervention to each of these students to close these reports.
Accessing a Concern Report#
To access your open concern reports, click the Open Reports option from the Concern Reports section of the Safeguarding side bar. This will load all of the open concern reports you’re the current owner of with some high level information to help you identify the correct report.
You can filter the page to show a certain subset of concern reports by selecting the concern type from the filter bar. To view a report, click the corresponding view button.
Permissions#
This functionality is protected by the following permissions:
Close All Concern Reports
Close Concern Reports
Manage All Concern Reports
Manage Concern Reports
Perform Initial Concern Report Reviews
Re-Open All Concern Reports
View Rejected Concern Reports
View Student Concern Reports
This page is available to users with the following roles:
Staff Members
Available with permission
Comments#
The comments section allows staff to have conversations regarding the concern report and it’s investigation. The comments are automatically stored alongside the report so that all information is available in a single place.
To add a new comment, click the Add Comment button to show a new window where you can enter the desired comment.
Once complete click the Add Comment button inside the popup window and the new comment will appear in the comments section for the concern report.
Tip
The maximum length of a single comment is 300 words.