Safeguarding young adults at The William Henry Smith College is paramount.

All college staff are trained in safeguarding children and adults, including training on managing disclosures and a focus on supporting young people with mental health challenges. College staff have further training on adult safeguarding, which ensures staff work effectively with our vulnerable young adults as they move across to adult services.

In addition to the College Safeguarding Team, The Smith Foundation employ a full time Social Worker who focuses on all aspects of Child Protection and Adult Safeguarding, furthermore we have a Family Intervention Support Worker who supports families of vulnerable adults and children.

We have further developed the early intervention work with the Police and events have been held which combine targeted work with activities to engage the learners involved in these concerns. With our social worker role, we have focussed on early identification and intervention, while developing professional external links such as hosting a school/college social worker group and delivering training to external agencies such as local Universities. It is hoped that this training will support newly qualified teachers and Social Workers to better understand the needs of children and young adults within our colleges/schools and how to effectively support them.

Staff at WHSSC are highly skilled and have accessed further specialised training in areas such as FASD, self-harm, CCE, knife-crime, ABE, county lines, Child Sexual Abuse, young people and mental health and understanding and managing harmful Sexualised behaviour.