Strategic leaders climb the tallest trees

Andy Churcher • November 11, 2024

“Injustices are not the exclusive preserve of the unjust; they can be presided over by people who are in all other respects well-meaning and decent.”

In her foreword to the Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry into safeguarding failings at Oxfam in the years after the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, Tina Stowell, The Rt Hon Baroness Stowell of Beeston MBE continued to say, “Being on the side of good is also no guarantee against leaders focussing on the wrong issues, prioritising the wrong things, or missing opportunities to put matters right.”

These words have stuck with me since I first read them, reminding me that while the leaders I work with usually have the right intentions and are well-meaning and decent, their strategic view doesn’t always naturally extend to safeguarding.

A truly strategic view adopts a broad, long-term perspective that encompasses all key elements of organisational practice, but also identifies and takes ownership of the risks faced by the organisation. We will never rid the world of people who want to abuse, neglect or exploit others and all our organisations carry an inherent risk of people using them to access children or adults at risk for these abhorrent purposes. Strong safeguarding arrangements are, therefore, all about risk management.

It may be, that safeguarding is a core part of the work the organisation does but, if not, leaders should still understand the risk to the organisation and to those people it works with, in order to understand and support appropriate risk mitigation. Safeguarding risk management is always evolving and developing and must be owned, resourced and appropriately delegated by organisational leaders.

In his book, Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other (full disclosure: I am a Hornets fan), John Preston describes a time in 1977 shortly after Graham Taylor took over as manager at Vicarage Road. The fitness of the team was not as good as it needed to be and training sessions would start with running laps around a local park. Not all the players were as committed to this as Graham would have liked, but he seemed to have an uncanny ability to know which players weren’t completing the run as required by him. After a few weeks they came to realise that he was following them to the park and climbing a tree to keep an eye on each of them, wherever they were in the park.

Organisational leaders must take ownership of all aspects of their business, including the risks faced, including safeguarding risks. The key question here is, are they viewing their organisation from a sufficiently elevated position so that they can see safeguarding alongside the rest of their responsibilities.

The word "strategic" is derived from the Greek word "στρατηγός" (strategos) which is a combination of two Greek words "στρατός" (stratos), meaning "army" or "troops" and "ἄγω" (ago) meaning "to lead" or "to guide”. A "strategos" was a military leader responsible for leading armies or managing military operations, often on multiple fronts and needing to execute effective warfare across all of them.

Our work, at Keep Governance and Safeguarding, often includes a focus on the strategic oversight of safeguarding by organisational leaders, sometimes helping them to effectively lead in other areas of responsibility as well. You can think of us as helping you to choose the right binoculars so that you can see more clearly from the higher branches you need to climb to.

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The value of safeguarding within a mosaic of factors to improve attainment

By Andy Churcher • March 21, 2025

The recently published DfE research report The link between attendance and attainment in an assessment year [1] outlines the significant benefits to schools and their pupils of improving attendance levels. I know that most schools are very proactive when it comes to supporting pupils to increase their attendance, and rightly so. Ofsted are interested in understanding this work during inspections with a recent report stating, “The school has addressed the significant challenges with pupils’ attendance and punctuality through effective actions to support and engage families.” But, of course, attendance isn’t the only factor impacting attainment in assessment. In fact, much research demonstrates that academic success measured by attainment is influenced by the whole life experience of the child. Ofsted’s 2022 paper Securing good attendance and tackling persistent absence [2] identified interdependencies between attendance and safeguarding. Effective and empathetic communication with parents is also an important tool in reducing absence. The same paper noted, “It is clear that leaders who have succeeded in raising attendance levels listen to parents properly and ask the right questions in order to find out why their children are not attending well enough.” There is also extensive research which helps us to understand the link between challenging behaviour and abuse, neglect and exploitation. The Truth Project, part of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse [3], gathered the insight of more than 6,000 victims and survivors of child sexual abuse. In its report, IICSA noted that victims and survivors knew their behaviour deteriorated as a result of being sexually abused sometimes, but not exclusively, as a deliberate attempt to communicate that they needed help, although sadly these signals were rarely recognised by others. And if behaviour can influence attainment then, of course, so can being the victim of abuse. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2024 National review into child sexual abuse within the family environment [4] stated that “abuse was reported to have impacted children’s education in nearly a third of reviews”. And, if all that’s the case we can begin to see a complex mosaic of interdependencies for children which have the power to influence their risk of being a victim of abuse, their behaviour in school, their attainment throughout their education and their whole life experience. Safeguarding and wellbeing should never be seen as separate to any other part of a child’s experience. I wonder if school leaders take a truly strategic view of this mosaic which results in a co-ordinated approach which is greater than the sum of its parts. Or if work to support pupils is often too fragmented at an organisational level to be sufficiently effective in tackling these interdependencies. Last year the Department of Education published a rapid literature review [5] to shape the work of the longitudinal Education and Outcomes Panel Study (EOPS). It identified this mosaic of issues that impact educational outcomes categorising them into four themes: Theme 1: Children’s cognitive and non-cognitive capabilities and wellbeing Theme 2: Children with SEND and experience of social services Theme 3: Home environment Theme 4: Experiences of school