This year’s conference theme - Courage, Creativity and Capacity - reflects three facets of leading safeguarding at scale in school trusts.
Trust safeguarding leaders and their teams support children and families with great courage, often in highly challenging and complex circumstances. Delegates will hear some case studies that demonstrate this and updates on new policies designed to better support some of our most vulnerable children and young people.
Trusts can do things differently. Alongside the statutory duty to uphold high standards of compliance, many trust safeguarding leaders are developing creative and proactive approaches to safeguarding and supporting the mental health of pupils and of staff. Practitioners will be sharing some of examples of this work to seed ideas and spread innovative practice.
The current fiscal climate and significant increase in social need, means that safeguarding capacity should be one of the top considerations for executive and governance leaders and policy makers. The conference will explore the findings of the new CST Community Report into Safeguarding at Scale and consider how to build understanding of the resources that excellence in trust safeguarding requires at both trust and at a sector level.
Based on feedback from previous conferences, this year's event will include more opportunities across the day for participants to engage with each other in workshop discussions and facilitated networking.
CST will also be hosting an optional informal pre-conference dinner for those who are travelling the night before and would like to connect.
The conference will take place on Thursday 25 January 2024 at Birmingham Conference and Events Centre. Places can be booked now, with preferential rates for CST member trusts.
Indicative programme
- Policy Keynote: Stable homes, built on love - Implementing the care review one year on
- Policy Keynote: The New National Strategy for Kinship Care: Daniel Foster, Deputy Director, Adoption, Family Justice & Alternatives to Care, DfE
- Leadership Keynote: Developing a Safeguarding Improvement Strategy: Sarah Bloomer, Director of Safeguarding, Core Trust
- Leading and Learning: Your first year as a Trust Safeguarding Lead Gill Creighton, Safeguarding Manager, Cumbria Education Trust
- Poverty Proofing: Trust strategies to tackle financial hardship and neglect: Helen Beattie, Head of Safeguarding, REAch2
- Making Trust governance work for you: Dai Durbridge, Partner, Browne Jacobson in conversation with Sam Sadeghi, Director of Trust Governance, CST
- Beyond the Culture Wars: Safeguarding transgender students: Jon Needham, National Director of Safeguarding, OCL
- Supervision or reflective practice? Developing the right model for your trust
- United by a common Language: Achieving consistency in trust safeguarding
- Case Study: Working beyond your trust boundaries
- Cutting through a complex CCE/CSE Network: Stuart Thomson, Head of Youth Services, Oasis Community Hub: Waterloo
- Panel: Safeguarding at Scale across the year ahead - Iona Jackson, Research Director, Edurio; Dai Durbridge, Browne Jacobson
