The Diocese of Leeds has invested in Safeguarding Dashboards following successful trials involving 10 Churches and one of our Cathedrals.
Dashboards make safeguarding administration and governance simpler for Parish Safeguarding Officers and everyone.
Safeguarding Dashboards is a specially designed resource being used by over 2,000 churches in 24 participating dioceses throughout the Church of England.
Many of our parishes have already started to use this helpful tool, and the feedback from Parish Safeguarding Officers has been overwhelmingly positive.
To learn how a Dashboard can help you, please open the attached link here which includes a really useful short video. It explains how to get started, where you can find support and gives advice for frequently asked questions.
Safeguarding Dashboards
More information on Safeguarding Dashboards can be found here.
One of the benefits of Safeguarding Dashboards is that it can produce an action plan for your parish at the click of a button. This action plan has three levels:
- Level 1 - Safer foundations
- Level 2 - Safer activities
- Level 3 - Safer procedures
Based on the answers to some simple questions, Safeguarding Dashboards will email you a PDF action plan that is tailored to each parish. This action plan can then be discussed and approved by the PCC.
Safeguarding Dashboards also brings several other benefits for incumbents and priests-in-charge:
- It shows the status of safeguarding at a glance. Green lights bring reassurance that all is well. Amber lights highlight actions that need to be completed. Red lights help to prioritise the most urgent actions.
- It reminds you when policies need to be reviewed, or other recurring tasks need to be completed.
- It points you to the latest and most relevant safeguarding documents and resources.
Furthermore, by analysing statistical data across the whole diocese, Safeguarding Dashboards also helps our diocesan safeguarding team to focus their support where it is most needed.
Safeguarding Dashboards is entirely consistent with the Parish Safeguarding Handbook. It doesn’t create extra work for a parish; rather, it helps parishes to do the things that they ought to be doing already.
Problems with email
A problem has been reported with users not receiving emails that were being sent to Hotmail email addresses. Recently the problem has extended and it now also includes Outlook and Live.co.uk email addresses (all of which are owned by Microsoft).
Safeguarding Dashboard are sorry for any inconvenience that this is causing you, and they are doing their best to get this problem fixed as quickly as possible. They have also added another member to their support team (Barbara Barker) who is directly helping affected users.
For anyone experiencing this problem please visit the new support page here.
Recommended steps
Many of you have done this already, but if not, we recommended the following three steps:
- Please ensure that each parish has a dashboard ‘owner’. Each parish has its own dashboard – this is because each PCC needs to discuss and approve its own Safeguarding Action Plan. Each dashboard needs an ‘owner’ who updates the dashboard by answering simple multiple-choice questions. Usually this is the Parish Safeguarding Officer, but it could be a churchwarden or another PCC member. Only Gail O’Neill, DBS and Safeguarding Administrator, can invite someone to be a dashboard owner. If a parish doesn’t have an owner (or you are not sure) please contact Gail on gail.oneill@leeds.anglican.org
- Please ask the owner to invite you to become a dashboard ‘viewer’. Once a dashboard has an owner, that person can invite others to become dashboard ‘viewers’. A dashboard ‘viewer’ can see all the information on the dashboard, but they can’t update it. I recommend that the incumbent and churchwardens are dashboard viewers, but the owner can invite other people too.
- Please request a safeguarding action plan. This is really easy. Any dashboard owner or viewer can request an action plan at the click of a button. This action plan can then be discussed and approved by the PCC.
Finally we are looking for Dashboard Champions to help others to use this tool within your Deanery. If you have found this Safeguarding Dashboards really useful and are willing to help your fellow PSO’s, please contact DSA Carla Darbyshire on Carla.Darbyshire@leeds.anglican.org
The Safeguarding Team.