By: Dr Alison Struthers, Associate Professor in Law at University of Warwick
There are the names we all know: Victoria Climbé, Peter Connelly, Daniel Pelka, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson. And there are the names that we will never know; the pseudonymous letters within Serious Case Reviews representing the invisible children devastatingly and gut-wrenchingly failed by those entrusted to love and care for them.
When each of these tragedies is splashed across the front pages of the national news, there is outcry. How could this happen…again? There is blame. Attribution of blame towards the abusers is warranted, and visceral. But blame extends to others: it is the fault of social workers; children’s services; teachers; Designated Safeguarding Leads, neighbours, relatives. In some cases, this blame may be justified. In other cases, it may not. In all cases, it should be recognised that people are working within, or interacting with, services that are chronically underfunded, understaffed, and overstretched. Assigning blame in the wake of tragedy is easy. Fingers are pointed cathartically for a few days, then lie in wait for the next heart-rending headline.
It was around 2013, during my empirical doctoral study into human rights education within English primary schools, that I first noticed the disconnect between two areas relevant to child protection: school safeguarding and educating children about their human rights. Teachers spoke of the prominence of school safeguarding policies and practice, and, in those schools embedding rights-respecting approaches, they spoke of the significance of children’s participation, voice and empowerment for their safety. But no connection was seemingly being made between the two. Safeguarding and human rights education inhabited different spheres: the former entrenched in teacher education, training, government policy, and school practice; the latter embraced by a passionate minority of teachers but largely overlooked systemically in English formal education.
Safeguarding guidance for schools in England is largely passive or reactive, with teachers instructed to identify and act upon safeguarding concerns, but without any requirement for them to equip children with the language and understanding for recognising abuse and neglect in their own lives and being able to vocalise that recognition. And it is undeniably the case that the elements of passivity inherent in the current school safeguarding procedures in this country have too often failed children. Less a reflection on the competency of teachers or other school staff and more a reflection on the reactive nature of safeguarding processes, some high-profile child protection cases have revealed shortcomings in the abilities of staff to identify cases of abuse or neglect before they escalate to tragedy. Staff at Daniel Pelka’s school had observed injuries to his face and neck and were troubled by his obsessive nature around food, but neither consistently recorded his injuries nor reported their concerns to the police or social services.[1] Various injuries were observed by teachers at different times during Daniel’s short time at school, but inconsistent recording meant that neither the frequency nor severity of the injuries was appreciated. The Serious Case Review into Daniel’s death noted that ‘the school did not have clear protocols to enable the compilation of information and concerns’, resulting in ‘a lack of clarity about when exactly injuries were seen, how many there were, and of the response to them’.[2] It emphasised that ‘no professional tried sufficiently hard enough to engage him to enable him to talk about his experiences at home’,[3] and he is described as having been ‘‘invisible’ as a needy child against the backdrop of his mother’s controlling behaviour’.[4]
The disconnect between safeguarding and human rights education troubled me. It seemed obvious that their greater interrelation could help to better protect children. Against this background, I wrote an article arguing that by equipping children with accurate, detailed and comprehensive knowledge and understanding of their rights – and the protection mechanisms for those rights – they may be able to better recognise and address violations of rights in their lived experiences.[5] I argued that instead of simply preparing teachers to recognise and act upon signs of abuse and neglect, their education and training could instead provide them with the tools to empower children to recognise and address breaches of rights in their own lives, to speak up about them, and to be confident in the knowledge that someone would actually help them.
In 2021, Dr Ruth Brittle and I set the wheels in motion for an empirical project that would compare the safeguarding and human rights education landscapes in Scotland and England. We gathered quantitative data from 380 teachers (254 in England; 126 in Scotland) and 237 safeguarding leads (199 Designated Safeguarding Leads in England; 38 Designated Child Protection Officers in Scotland) and the results from the pilot study indicate that our planned further work in this area is justified. Human rights, and in particular the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), are embedded within education and safeguarding policy in Scotland to a far greater extent than England, and the impact of this on practice in this area is clear. In Scotland, 97% of the teachers surveyed are aware of the UNCRC, compared with 77% in England and, perhaps more importantly, this translates into 94% of Scottish teachers believing the UNCRC informs their practice in contrast to 68% of English teachers. With particular regard to the intersection of safeguarding and human rights, 73% of the Scottish teachers in the sample advise that children are taught about their human rights as part of school safeguarding. Only 55% of English teachers report the same.
These findings merit further exploration, and this is something that Ruth and I will be undertaking this year. In particular, we want to speak to children about these issues (ethical considerations and tight timeframes prevented this in our pilot). But our preliminary data speaks to an important tentative hypothesis: that embedding human rights within government policy provides teachers with the space and legitimacy to incorporate human rights education into their safeguarding practice. What we must consider going forward is whether this may translate into better protection for children and, to understand this, we need to put the views of children front and centre in the second tranche of this research.
Too often, children have been failed by the English safeguarding system. A system that relies on the observations of those who come into contact with children assumes that each link in the chain connects effortlessly to the next; that every teacher who notices an unusual bruise on a child will be suspicious enough of that incident in isolation to record or report it, resulting in a holistic picture of a pattern of abuse. This did not happen in the case of Daniel Pelka, not through the fault of any one member of staff but through the failing of a system that relies predominantly on reactivity in the face of suspected abuse or neglect. In cases such as Daniel’s, where a number of staff members witness different injuries over time, each teacher in isolation may not consider their observations significant enough to merit escalation. This is where children fall through the cracks, and this will happen in any safeguarding system that relies on passive teacher observation.
By equipping teachers with a fundamental legal understanding of the human rights to which everyone, including children, is entitled, as well as the mechanisms for their protection, and encouraging them to empower children to recognise and address rights violations in their own lives, the inherent passivity of certain school safeguarding systems may be challenged. It almost seems too obvious a point to make that everything possible should be done at the level of school safeguarding to prevent cases either escalating to the point where multiple agencies become involved, or ending in heart-breaking tragedy where children have slipped through the net. If the silent voices of invisible children could be empowered to speak up about the harm they are experiencing, then Human Rights Education will have served an important purpose.
[1] Coventry Safeguarding Children Board. (September 2013). Serious Case Review Re Daniel Pelka: Overview Report. Retrieved from http://mandatenow.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/FINAL-Overview-Report-DP-130913-Publication-version-1.pdf, pp.5 & 26. [2] Ibid, p. 59. [3] Ibid, p. 32. [4] Ibid, p. 6. [5] Struthers, A., ‘Protecting Invisible Children in England: How human rights education could improve school safeguarding’ (2021) 4(3) Human Rights Education Review 45-64 (https://humanrer.org/index.php/human/article/view/4473/4112).
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