Before the summer I caught up with Martin Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Safeguarding Company. Martin is a former chief police officer whose 38-year career spanned five UK police forces, where he was responsible for all aspects of safeguarding and child protection and managed the risks posed by violent and sexual offenders living in the community. You can read more on Martin’s background here.

During the Q&A, Martin and I had an insightful conversation focused purely on the recent Child Q safeguarding incident. Some particularly interesting areas of discussion include:

• How the action taken with Child Q was disproportionate vs the potential suspicion
• Martin challenges the current way of thinking and what you should ask yourself before acting in a safeguarding incident
• We talk about the adultification of black and minority children, removing their innocence of age.
• How we may misinterpret ‘Fawn’ as acceptance
• The impact on Child Q and her family, and the damage it has done
• How intersectionality comes into play when discriminating against Child Q
• Why we cannot hide behind unconscious bias
• How we need to change the training and culture to ensure we never have another Child Q situation again

We’ve split it into two parts to make it easier to digest.

(TW: this conversation contains potentially distressing subject matter)

Additional reading

Following on from the #FinnemoreFireside chat, Martin has suggested that the following would be useful additional reading about some of the topics covered in this chat Guidance for safer working practice for those working with children and young people in education settings (February 2022).

Martin has also pointed out that, since the publication of the Child Q case practice review, the Department for Education has updated its guidance on searching, screening and confiscation in schools.  The revised guidance can be found here.