The Church of England is committed to promoting a safe environment and culture across all church bodies for children, young people and vulnerable adults. An essential part of this commitment is ensuring that all those who work or volunteer with vulnerable groups are suitable for the role they will carry out.
House of Bishops Safeguarding Guidance (entitled Safer Recruitment and People Management) has been developed (to replace Safer Recruitment Practice Guidance 2016). The guidance offers church bodies clarity and detail on key areas which have been consistently raised as areas of concern and confusion; for example, DBS eligibility criteria, reference checking requirements and who the guidance applies to.
The guidance includes a toolkit consisting of a number of forms designed to help implement the guidance to a good standard, as well as an assessment tool to help you review and understand your current safer recruitment and people management practices and procedures, and easily identify where you may have gaps in your processes.
The Safer Recruitment and People Management Guidance
The Safer Recruitment and People Management Guidance is available via the online Safeguarding e-manual. This is the first guidance to go onto the Safeguarding e-Manual and eventually all safeguarding guidance will be located here.
Please find the assessment toolkit here for your reference.
The guidance aims to make it as easy as possible for everyone to understand expectations and apply them in their particular environment.
In doing so, you will be creating and maintaining a safe and supportive environment that inspires trust, enabling individuals to thrive and grow, and have the very best experience of Christian living through the work of the Church.
Online learning module
The online learning module for Safer Recruitment and People Management is now live on the Safeguarding Training Portal. The link for the course is on the home page and can also be found under Online Courses.
Other HR policies, practice guidance and resources
-
Clergy Discipline Measure (on the Church of England website)
-
Watch a series of induction films on the Safeguarding Training Portal
Model Role Descriptions
The Model Role Descriptions for common roles in parishes can be found here. These role descriptions will need to be amended to fit your local context and it is important that the description has the level of both DBS check (if required) and Safeguarding Learning added, so expectations of the person and the role are clear from the outset.