Conference 2024: Courage, creativity and capacity

Thursday 25 January 2024 at the Birmingham Conference and Events Centre

Our 2024 conference has now taken place, but you can register for updates for our 2025 event.

CST Trust Safeguarding Conference

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. We 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. We 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.

This year’s conference also seeks to hold space for the expertise held by members of our Professional Community by creating more opportunities across the day for participants to engage with each other in workshop discussions and guided networking.

At the conference you can:

• Gain insight into the policy and research that's shaping safeguarding practice
• Explore the unique challenges of safeguarding at scale and gain practical strategies and guidance to take back to colleagues in your school trust
• Participate in a constructive professional dialogue between practitioners and policy makers
• Connect with other CST community members to build your professional network
• Meet leading suppliers of safeguarding services to discover how they can support you

Who should attend?

The conference is an extension of CST's Professional Community for Trust Safeguarding and is aimed at designated safeguarding leads, trust leaders, and others with an interest in safeguarding.

Exhbition opportunities

The conference offers a unique opportunity to bring together safeguarding leaders and organisations and suppliers that support them to be as effective as possible.

If you are interested in exhibiting at the conference, please contact partnerships@cstuk.org.uk for details.