Initial Assessment: Plan & Gather Information
Plan
What to gather?
- Child Safety Concern. What is the concern about? Details of the concern. Often this will need to be extracted from a narrative.
- People
The people who are related to the Child Safety Concern. Such as children, parents of the children, those who raise the concern and respondents of allegations of misconduct.
Who to gather?
To be gathered by a Child Safety worker of your organisation who is aware of your Child Safety Policy. While you can and should seek outside consultation, it is not advisable to outsource the initial assessment to a outside person or organisation.
Gathering Information
How to gather?
If you are an organisation that is in the one location (such as a school) you can simply have face to face conversations to gather the relevant information.
If you are an organization that has multiple locations (such as a mission) then you can rely on gathering the information remotely such as via email, phone calls, zoom and/ or delegate the task of collecting the information to a member of personnel who is onsite. It would be counterproductive to expect your organization to travel to attend every Child Safety Concern to conduct an initial assessment.
You need to take care not to ‘dig too far’ and prematurely enter into another assessment stage. For example, if you discover concerns of misconduct at this stage, you should not start a conversation with the respondent as this may appear that you have breached their due process rights of being provided with reasonable notice of a misconduct assessment.