For children facing bullying, abuse or situations that make them feel unsafe, speaking up can be difficult. Some members of Chrisland Schools’ management team and its Designated Safeguarding Officers told journalists, including Funmi Ogundare, how the school is working to create an environment where learners feel safe reporting concerns and seeking help. They explained how initiatives such as its Safeguarding Week, confidential reporting channels, staff training and regular risk assessments are helping to make safety and child protection a shared responsibility among learners, parents and staff across the school’s campuses For a child who is being bullied, feels unsafe or is struggling with a situation that they do not know how to handle, the hardest step can often be finding the courage to speak. At Chrisland Schools, the message during Safeguarding Week is simple: speak up, and someone will listen. Across its 16 schools, the management is seeking to make safety and safeguarding more than rules contained in a handbook or instructions delivered during an assembly. It wants them to become part of how learners think, behave, and relate to others. For the Head of Risk, Compliance, Safeguarding and Child Protection, Kemi Fajemirokun, the objective goes beyond satisfying regulatory requirements. “Our focus is beyond compliance, embedding the whole school safety culture and safeguarding culture for positive character development in every learner,” she stated. That philosophy is reflected in the school’s approach to safeguarding, which places learners, parents and staff at the centre of what Fajemirokun described as a ‘triangle of responsibility’. “The children are focused on what they should do; the parents are focused on what they should do; and the teaching and non-teaching staff are also focused on what they should do,” she explained. The approach is particularly important in a school environment where children spend a significant part of their formative years interacting with peers and adults. Rather than waiting for an incident to occur before responding, Fajemirokun said the school has deliberately built safety awareness into the everyday school experience. For about seven years, the school has held a dedicated safety and safeguarding awareness week, using different themes each term to address emerging concerns and remind the entire school community of their responsibilities. This year’s theme, ‘Beyond Compliance: Embedding the Whole School Safety Culture and Safeguarding Culture for Positive Character Development in Every Learner’, she noted, captures the school’s attempt to make safety instinctive. Fajemirokun wants learners and staff to develop what she described as a safety mindset, an internal awareness of when an action could place them or another person at risk. “We want it to become a culture where every learner, every staff member and every child has a mindset of safety and safeguarding in their DNA, that I cannot do this thing because I am going to be vulnerable; I cannot do this thing because it is going to expose me to danger,” she said. Every planned activity, Fajemirokun noted, must undergo a risk assessment before it receives clearance. “We do risk management of all our processes every time. Before we do anything, we must assess the risks. Only after you have completed the risk assessment can you clear a school to proceed with whatever you have planned. This means safety considerations are expected to precede activities rather than being introduced after something goes wrong,” she explained. One of the most significant elements of the safeguarding programme is creating safe channels for children to raise concerns. At schools in Ikeja, Idimu and Festac, Victoria Island, Designated Safeguarding Officers (DSOs) said learners are encouraged to report bullying, abuse or anything that makes them uncomfortable. They, however, noted that reporting is not always easy. Some children may be afraid of being labelled a ‘snitch’. Others may fear retaliation from the person they have reported or worry that their peers will discover that they raised the alarm. The schools therefore assured learners that confidentiality is central to the reporting process. A designated safeguarding officer at Chrisland School, Opebi, Ikeja, Abimbola Taylor, explained that where a child was uncomfortable being identified, the matter could be treated as a general observation rather than attributed directly to the child. The objective, she said, was to ensure that “nobody will even trace it to whoever has reported”. The system also recognises that not every child will be comfortable standing before an adult and narrating what happened. For such learners, safeguarding boxes have been provided where they can write down their concerns and submit them. The designated safeguarding officers then review the rep
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