Three points for attention

Based on its study, the Inspectorate identifies three points for attention regarding (social) safety at school:

  1. Safety policy is often spread across different locations and consists of various documents.
  2. Safety policy is primarily focused on students and their parents, but not on staff. This is despite the fact that staff play an important role in (social) safety.
  3. The importance of having a good conversation: what do we mean by (social) safety? And how do we hold each other accountable? Both from staff towards students and among staff themselves. Staff also find it difficult to address colleagues about behaviour relating to (social) safety.

Based on the results above, the Inspectorate makes three recommendations.

Three recommendations for (social) safety

Below are the three recommendations from the Inspectorate of Education, followed by inspiration for how you can get started with them.

  1. Create a policy plan for (social) safety
    The Inspectorate recommends creating one clear policy plan describing the tasks and responsibilities of all those involved (e.g. confidential advisers and teachers). For example, use the Digital Safety Plan: a useful tool for bringing together everything related to (social) safety within the school in one place. It also provides inspiration for working on social safety at school.
  2. Facilitate discussions about (social) safety and incorporate them into a code of conduct
    Facilitate meetings in which people with assigned responsibilities, parents and students can discuss their own norms, values and moral dilemmas.
    - The Appropriate Behaviour game from School & Safety helps educational teams make desirable and undesirable behaviour open to discussion and jointly establish agreements and rules. We have a version for primary education and for secondary/vocational education.
    - Also make use of the pedagogical guides to social safety. Use the five videos as a starting point for discussing social safety with one another. Each video comes with guiding questions that sharpen your thinking about a classroom situation. Read here how to subsequently record the outcomes of these discussions in a code of conduct: rules of conduct in education. The Inspectorate also recommends repeating these discussions regularly and including them in the annual plan. It is important to provide people with assigned responsibilities with further training on changes to your policy. During this training, also give specific attention to the duty to report, consult and notify the authorities.
  3. Make use of information from monitoring (social) safety
    Schools are required to monitor students’ sense of safety every year, which provides important information. The Inspectorate recommends analysing the signals received and using this analysis to further deepen discussions about (social) safety.

The full thematic study on (social) safety, ‘More social safety also means more discussion; including with the student’, by the Inspectorate of Education can be read here.