Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy

Introduction

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that provides support to high-achieving, ambitious students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. We begin working with students when they are in Year 12 (England and Wales, S5 (Scotland) and Year 13 (Northern Ireland) by offering support in the form of e-mentoring, internships, university application advice and skills development and career insight workshops. Due to the nature of the SMF’s work and our interaction with young people, it is important that we have a safeguarding and child protection policy to ensure that our students are safe while undertaking each of our four pillars of SMF support. As such, our safeguarding policy focuses on protecting students during internships, their e-mentoring relationship with professionals, whilst gaining university application assistance and attending workshops, be that in-person or virtually. Students are sometimes given media opportunities or platforms to speak as part of advocacy and campaigns work, so we have also built in protection for students in these circumstances. This policy outlines the types of interactions that may occur between our young people and adults and how best to prevent child protection concerns from arising.

All the staff of the SMF are aware of the important role that we play in ensuring the safety of our students. This policy outlines the systems and procedures that are necessary to protect and promote the welfare of the students. In developing our safeguarding and child protection policy, the SMF makes use of the guidance from Working Together to Safeguard Children (Department of Education, December 2023), the relevant Safeguarding Partners including Local Authority (LA), the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and the Police.

This policy applies to adults working in any capacity with the SMF, including, but not limited to, SMF employees, volunteers, mentors, and individuals working with SMF students on internships. However, some parts of the policy are expressly stated to only apply to particular groups. All adults working with the SMF will be informed about, and provided with a copy/link to, the SMF’s Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy.