Child Safeguarding Corner

The Child Safe Standards provide us with tangible guidance about how to create cultures, adopt strategies and act to put the interests of children first to keep them safe from harm. Each fortnight, I present one of the standards and ask you to reflect on how you think we’re addressing the recommendations. We welcome ideas and feedback from our families and community! This week, we’re looking at Standard 9: Implementation of the Child Safe Standards is continuously reviewed and improved.

The aim of this standard is to identify and minimise risks to ensure that we continuously improve our child-safe practices.  This standard is important because Child Safe Standards are more effective if implementation is continuously reviewed and improved. Being a child-safe organisation is an evolving process that requires ongoing efforts to keep children safe. 

Our aim is to prioritise this standard for child safety in what we say and do:

• We maintain a culture of continuous improvement to ensure policies and procedures are implemented and routinely reviewed.
• We know the value of continuous monitoring, open conversations and exploring new ways to keep children safe. 
• We review incidents to identify the cause and the risks to the safety of children and to make improvements. 

We now have a page on our school website dedicated to Child Safeguarding, and we encourage you to view it. 

If you have any questions or feedback about how we are addressing this particular Standard or about our new Child Safeguarding page, please email me (petra.cole@cg.catholic.edu.au). 

Friendology

St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps our students to establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience. One of the first foundational concepts in the friendship skills curriculum teaches our students about the difference between healthy and unhealthy friendships. 

Some friendships bring out the best in us, while, unfortunately, some bring out the worst. It’s important to teach children that friendships are a choice. The Friend-o-Meter was developed by URSTRONG because research shows that children don’t always assess or evaluate their friendships, which means they accept both the good and the bad. We want children to think about whether or not friendships are healthy for them, and it’s critical that we start now. In order for self-compassion to be an instinct when considering future relationships, children should be encouraged to ask themselves: 

• Is this friendship good for me? 
• Does this person treat me with the respect I deserve? 

You can join URSTRONG and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills that we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open up a dialogue with your children. You can join URSTRONG for free: https://urstrong.com/.

Petra Cole

Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher