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.

Just before Bett this year, Nick caught up with Lawrence Royston, Founder of teamSOS, to talk all things edtech.

Lawrence is one of the true entrepreneurs of the Edtech market. Along with his partner Joanne, he started with GroupCall messenger, the first SMS messaging system for schools in the UK, then built Xporter, supporting Third parties to have a generic way to integrate with MIS data, before looking at how they could provide deeper insights in the data they were already transferring through GroupCall XVault. He’s also supported GDPRis and has recently started a new business in teamSOS, an incident management and compliance tool for staff in Education and NHS establishments.

We’ve split the interview into two parts to make it easier to digest. In part one Nick and Lawrence discuss:

• What it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset
• Working with partners (and family!), their symbiotic skills, and how this is a great asset in business
• The thinking behind teamSOS, where the idea came from, and the problem it solves
• The importance of listening and learning from users
• ‘Successive approximation’ and continually iterating solutions to help better meet the needs of your customers

In part two they talk about:

• What advice would Lawrence give budding edtech entrepreneurs based on his own experience?
• Getting work/life balance right
• The effect of recent market changes: how consolidation makes space for speedboats!
• The innovation bubbling away in the background within smaller businesses that lead on vision and integration
• Modernising technology (case in point: walkie talkies)
• Their approach to pricing and delivering value
• How making school staff feel cared for attracts and retains the best candidates

Enjoy!

Continuing our series of business thought leader interviews, I recently caught up with Luke Pargeter, Co-founder and CEO of iAM Compliant.

Every school has a legal duty of care to their staff, pupils and visitors to their premises. The problem can be that remaining within the law can be costly and time consuming if not managed efficiently, which is why Luke and his co-founders created iAM Compliant.

iAM Compliant is a web-based tool, designed to help schools with everyday health and safety compliance, reporting, eLearning and more.

In this fireside chat we discuss:

• What gave Luke the inspiration to create iAM Compliant and how the team was formed
• The relationship between safety, environment and learning
• The impact of compliance on wellbeing and staff retention
• What differentiates iAM Compliant from the competition?
• How Luke sees the edtech compliance market evolving in the future, and where iAM Compliant will be in 3 years time.

We’ve split the interview into 3 sections to make it easier to digest. Enjoy!

During lockdown I had a virtual get together with One Team Logic CEO, Martin Baker, to talk about how his company helps schools handle safeguarding issues using their MyConcern software.

We talk about teaching, safeguarding, his background in the police force, the pressure on school staff, Kris Akabusi, and a great deal more!

This instalment in our series of Q&As with edtech business leaders doesn’t just focus on software and solutions; we talk about the wider, more serious issues around child safety, grooming, the role of parents, and how ill-equipped many people really are to deal with very difficult issues.

We’ve split it into four parts to make it easier to digest. Hope you like it, and we’d welcome your comments.