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All school staff (teaching and support) now have a duty and obligation to protect and safeguard children in their care. To be able to do this, school staff need to understand what safeguarding is and how to respond, but also need to understand a number of other concepts such as: why children end up in vulnerable situation in the first place, how teaching practices reduce vulnerability, and how to engage with children and young people in an effective and efficient manner. This chapter explores these latter types of concerns and in doing so identifies that teachers and support staff are key professionals in identifying vulnerability, preventing the escalation of concerns, engaging with children and supporting them and their education over time as they engage with and attend school. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection and concludes with reflective comments about the implications of this collection for you as an individual and in your career: working with children and young people in educational establishments.

It is dangerous in relation to practice and safeguarding to conclude that risks exist, or do not exist, in relation to a particular type of parental behaviour and family functioning. Using parental alcohol use as an illustrative topic this chapter explores definitions of alcohol use, the significance of parental use and the mechanisms and ways it is believed alcohol use leads to harms and then affects children and their educational experiences. In doing so this chapter recognises that it can be challenging and difficult to identify different thresholds of harms and risk from parental substance use alone. It also recognises and concludes by critically reflecting on the role teachers and educational staff have to play in assessing need, reducing pupil and parental stigma and shame around alcohol use, understanding the position of the parent and what children need to encourage their involvement and discussion around concerns like parental alcohol use.

Involving People with Lived Experience (PwLE) in the development and delivery of teaching provides a more in-depth insight and authenticity to students learning about important social concerns like substance use. Involving PwLE is recognised as an approach to teaching and collaboration which is beneficial for those involved as learners and (if done correctly) for those who gift their time to sharing their opinions and experiences. More is known within the literature about the benefits for academics and students in relation to involving PwLE in the development, design, and delivery of teaching, less is known about how PwLE experience their involvement and how they prepare for their involvement in the process. In this reflective chapter, we utilise our own collective experiences of working with and/or supporting the involvement of PwLE in the development of teaching resources and teaching practices. The reflections contained here are based upon own highly subjective experiences of working with and supporting PwLE to get involved in the development of resources and delivery of teaching content. From these reflections, we hope that you the reader is able to understand more about how PwLE and this will encourage you to become engaged with this process. In doing so, we hope you also gain some insights into your own teaching practices and learning needs.

All school staff need to have a critical self-understanding of how their perceptions of children, childhood and risk inform their practice when they are engaging with children and reflecting on factors linked to safeguarding. This chapter begins by discussing and briefly revisiting the duties and obligations that all staff have in relation to safeguarding children in educational settings. It then goes onto discuss the concept of teachers as ‘significant non parental adults’ (Rishel, Sales, & Koeske, 2005) and explores some of the finer details of why teachers and teaching staff are key players in relation to identifying risks, preventing harms whilst dealing with safeguarding concerns. We conclude this chapter by illustrating and arguing that teachers are key players identifying the needs of children and also have the potential to influence positive behaviour change in them. We also set a context for the remainder of this section: understanding the nature of concerns and risk by outlining the contribution each of the remaining individual chapters has to bring to this collection.

Any topic can be sensitive, and every subject area will have sensitive issues and topics that academics in higher education and further education settings will be expected to negotiate. Your ability to negotiate sensitive topics is important because the ways in which you engage and teach about sensitive topics will affect your ability to provide a positive learning experience and teaching alliance with students. In practice, you will face enormous pressure to ‘deliver’ on teaching, which will only be mirrored by similar freedoms in deciding on how and what needs to be done to get students to where they need to be. Negotiating, identifying, preparing for and delivering teaching on sensitive subjects and topics can be difficult in individual academics. This chapter, seeks to prepare you for developing a deeper understanding of some of the philosophical, theoretical, and practical-based concerns and issues related to teaching sensitive topics and subjects. This chapter begins with providing a rationale for what follows, and it explores some of the key themes, positionality, identity, transformational learning and lived experience, that are explored in greater depth in the collection. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection, and it concludes with some reflective comments about the implications of the collection for you as an individual and your career.

Through association with a family member who uses substances, stigma and shame can be experienced by children and young people whose parents use substances. Such stigma and induced shame can lead to fear of being treated unfairly and for some young people the experience of bullying and discrimination from peers, adults, and practitioners. Within my research, young people often described feeling that they had ‘survived’ within their experiences of parental substance use, rather than ‘thrived’, leaving them feeling lonely and isolated from support. Stigma played a role in this survival. By understanding the stigma experienced by young people whose parents use substances, we can move beyond young people only surviving their experiences to supporting them to thrive. Within this chapter, experiences of delivering interactive workshops and teaching practitioners about the lived experiences of children and young people whose parents use substances are reflected upon. Young people who experience parental substance use want practitioners and learners to have four key takeaways when supporting or working with young people: realisation and awareness of the impacts on young people, recognition of ways young people cope, responding in ways of understanding, and resisting further stigmatisation and isolation of young people.

What makes a child vulnerable to harm? What is it about how we conceptualise vulnerability that draws us to thinking about individual traits and characteristics rather than broader systems and structures of power? In this chapter, we consider these questions by exploring student experiences of vulnerability in schools. Drawing on a case study of two student experiences of harmful sexual behaviour, we explore harm, abuse and vulnerability as spatial. In doing so, we present school responses to forms of harm, drawing a division between responses which focus on vulnerable individuals and the potential of responses which target the systemic, spatial and contextual causes of harm. We conclude by offering Contextual Safeguarding as an approach for addressing the social conditions of harm.