SAFEGUARDING
IPC Safeguarding Practices
IPC updates its safeguarding policies annually setting out key priorities and expectations, and defining relevant staffing, ensuring consistency with any evolving needs or legislation. The charity has a Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) and a Lead Safeguarding Trustee – both with relevant training, and both available to staff, volunteers, and trustees, confidentially.
Procedures are in place for incident reporting and response, including external referrals as needed, and contingencies for if the DSL or Lead Safeguarding Trustee are away or unavailable. The DSL conducts a safeguarding briefing for new staff and for all periodically, including when there are substantial changes to the safeguarding policy. A safeguarding briefing is booked in for November, and all staff, trustees, and volunteers will be required to join this call, live or recorded, and sign the declaration. This ensures staff have read, understood, and agree to comply with the policy, and know how to report incidents.
The risk register, monitored by the trustee board and reviewed periodically, ensures that appropriate projects involving supervision of vulnerable adults or children are identified, risk assessments are carried out, and procedures are put in place. IPC currently only has one activity involving supervision of children, which is a children’s Ukrainian class. Staff involved have had relevant DBS checks and safeguarding procedures are in place. IPC is committed to providing a safe, welcoming and supportive environment for all staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries.
Our safeguarding policies
Equity, Diversity, and Anti-Racist Safeguarding Commitment
We recognise that our service users—including asylum seekers, refugees, and new migrants—frequently experience intersecting vulnerabilities due to their displaced status, immigration circumstances, and the systemic barriers they face upon arrival.
As part of our commitment to keeping all individuals safe from harm, we explicitly acknowledge the existence and impact of structural racism within the wider health, social care, and statutory safeguarding systems. We understand that structural inequalities can manifest as:
- Systemic Disparities: Differences in how minoritised groups are treated, assessed, or supported by statutory services.
- Adultification and Bias: The harmful tendency for vulnerable children and young people from minoritised backgrounds to be perceived as more mature, resilient, or independent than their peers, which can obscure their actual safeguarding and protection needs.
- Cultural Misunderstandings or Silence: The failure to openly discuss race, ethnicity, culture, and trauma, which can lead to misinterpreting distress or wrongly labelling families as “hard to reach.”
Our Commitment
We are dedicated to dismantling these barriers by embedding an anti-racist, trauma-informed approach across our entire organisation. We commit to:
- Seeing the Individual: We will look past structural assumptions, legal labels, and cultural stereotypes to see, hear, and understand the unique lived experience of every child and adult we support.
- Practising Cultural Humility: We will not treat culture as a box-ticking exercise. Instead, our staff will maintain an ongoing practice of open curiosity, active listening, and continuous learning to respect and validate our clients’ backgrounds.
- Challenging Assumptions: We will actively reflect on and challenge personal and systemic biases in our risk assessments, ensuring that distress, trauma, or non-traditional family structures are never misconstrued as calculated risk or lack of compliance.
- Advocating Safely: Where statutory systems fail to see the vulnerability of our clients due to structural bias, we will use our voice to challenge those decisions, advocating fiercely for their right to protection and dignity.