Karen Crosland, Head of Safeguarding, Huddersfield Town Football Club
Huddersfield Town Football Club (HTAFC) is a professional football club with a fan base of around 18,000 people, a football academy for elite 9-16 year old players as well as 16-18 year old apprentices. They also have a community department called The Foundation, a registered charity providing lifelong opportunities for people in their area to feel safe, healthy and included as part of a community. Working with a wide range of vulnerable groups across their different sites proved challenging when recording safeguarding and child protection concerns.
Exploring CPOMS
Having a system which makes reporting an easy process is key to protecting the individuals and groups HTAFC works with. They decided to use CPOMS StudentSafe as a way to provide chronological records which allows the senior and designated safeguarding managers to quickly identify changes in behaviour, trends and concerns leading to prompt action.
Support and Implementation
CPOMS was recommended to HTAFC following a compliance audit in which they were advised they were the Gold Standard in terms of online safeguarding monitoring systems. They have been a customer since February 2022 and, according to Karen Crosland, Head of Safeguarding, they have not been disappointed since switching from their previous provider. She stated some of the key considerations leading to change were:
“The CPOMS support team was amazing, and they went the extra mile to assist in getting us onboard and setup with the offer of additional training. We were carefully guided through the onboarding process and provided with support which helped us get up to speed quickly. They helped to tailor the system to meet our specific needs, and once set up, we have found the CPOMS system to be easily customisable to further enhance our usage.”
Karen Crosland, Head of Safeguarding, Huddersfield Town Football Club
HTAFC found StudentSafe easy to customise to meet their individual needs and were able to develop their own reporting form in line with the statutory requirements of sports clubs. The system is simple for the staff to operate, thus increasing the number and quality of referrals, and has improved the speed of reporting incidents. Most incidents are now reported and recorded within four hours whereas previously reporting could take 24-48 hours.
The ability for all members of their multi-disciplinary teams to record concerns quickly and easily regarding their students/players has led to earlier interventions when trends and concerns have come to light through monitoring by the senior and designated safeguarding managers. Real-time alerts and notifications mean that they are quickly aware of concerns, enabling them to provide additional support, advice and guidance in a timely manner–all of which is recorded in one place.
The comprehensive reporting and analytics function allows a deeper dive into incidents trends and identification of risk factors which inform proactive safeguarding and risk assessment measures. This function has proved to be particularly helpful when providing reports for audit compliance, board and trustee reports alongside information for case review at safeguarding team meetings. It is also helpful in putting together incident timelines and providing information for meetings with parents and other relevant stakeholders.
The customisable privacy settings have ensured that information is only shared with those who are entitled to see it and are in a position to assist with keeping individuals safe. This is particularly important since they work across a number of sites with separate staff and student cohorts.
More recently, HTAFC has also further customised their system to include equality, diversity and inclusion incident reporting which has really helped them to identify areas in their business which require further work in this field.
Karen stated, “Undoubtedly, the use of CPOMS StudentSafe has strengthened our safeguarding and child protection monitoring procedures across the whole of the business. Our staff have no hesitation in using the system and their incident reporting skills have definitely improved along with the timeliness of reporting.”
With all the information being in one place and easy to locate the senior safeguarding and designated safeguarding managers have a very clear overview of what is going on in each area of the business thus enabling them to be proactive rather than reactive.
The HTAFC also finds value in the educational articles, blogs, webinars and briefings shared by the CPOMS team, available to all users, which provides them with helpful insights into national and other emerging trends related to safeguarding.
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