Sharing learning about child protection and safeguarding during COVID-19
Here’s a look back at some of the resources, research and training we’ve produced in 2020 to support you in protecting the children and young people you work or volunteer with during this challenging time.
Elearning and training
We temporarily made our paid-for safeguarding awareness course free for you to access. Our 15-minute course has been accessed around 20,000 times so far this year, supporting many of you in keeping children safe.
We’ve also:
- adapted our face-to-face training to be delivered virtually with expert trainers via Zoom
- launched four new elearning courses on child protection in primary and secondary schools, safeguarding children with SEND and training for bus and taxi drivers
- developed online training packages for schools
- produced two new face-to-face courses on safeguarding d/Deaf and disabled children and trauma and child brain development training.
> Find the right course for you
Information and resources
We’ve kept on top of all the latest government guidance from across the UK to provide answers about safeguarding during the pandemic.
As well as producing briefings we’ve also:
- used insight from NSPCC helpline contacts and Childline counselling sessions to highlight the impact of physical abuse, online abuse, sexual abuse and domestic abuse on young people during the pandemic
- published research assessing how likely conditions caused by the pandemic at the start of the first lockdown heightened the risk of child abuse in the UK
- shared experiences of NSPCC staff who supported children and families during COVID-19
- captured the learning from the process of adapting Baby Steps – our service to help parents cope with pressures of a new baby – to help inform our ongoing service development.
How safe are our children?
Although our How Safe are our children conference was postponed until March 2021, we still published our How Safe are our children report. This year looked at the latest statistics relating to abuse perpetrated against adolescents.
Key topics
Take a look at the new information we’ve developed on county lines, healthy sexual development of children and young people, child mental health and safeguarding information for tutors.
Your enquiries answered
Our team of dedicated Information specialists continued to be on hand to support people working or volunteering with children and young people. Our service responded to over 1,500 enquiries, indexed and abstracted new publications in our free-to-access library catalogue and compiled email alerts to keep you up-to-date with the latest child protection.
Podcast
We’ve continued to release podcast episodes and launched 14 podcast episodes this year on a range of topics from adapting our services for children and families to harmful sexual behaviour in schools. Our most recent episode features our CEO, Peter Wanless discussing how the NSPCC has adapted to support children and young people.
Case reviews
Our team have continued to build the collection of case reviews and published new learning from case reviews briefings.
Helping you support children during COVID-19
Our safeguarding best practice information has been updated to reflect the new ways of working during the pandemic. Our topics include: remote teaching, recruiting safely and updating safeguarding policies. We'll continue to update this information as things change in each UK nation.
Browse our list of services and resources to support your work with children, young people and their families.
Adapting our services for children and families
We’ve continued to run some of our services and adapt our programmes during the pandemic. We’ve released an online version of our Speak out Stay safe programme for schools and adapted our InCtrl and Baby Steps services so our programmes can continue to help children and families during this difficult time.
We’ll be sharing more research on how we’ve adapted our services in 2021.
More to come in 2021
This is just a small selection of the work we did in 2020 to inform and most importantly, support you in keeping children safe. Follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date.