Safeguarding Children with Disabilities

About this course.

Every child has the right to be safe and to be protected from abuse and neglect. Children with disabilities have exactly the same right — yet the evidence is clear and uncomfortable: disabled children are at significantly higher risk of abuse and neglect than their non-disabled peers, and at the same time they are less likely to be recognised as being abused and less likely to be protected. Research consistently finds that disabled children are around three times more likely to experience abuse, while remaining under-represented in child protection plans and case numbers. This course exists to close that gap by helping everyone who works with disabled children to see the risks clearly and act on them.

This training is for teachers, special educational needs and disability (SEND) staff, early-years practitioners, teaching assistants, health and social care workers, therapists, personal-care staff, transport staff, volunteers and anyone else who comes into contact with disabled children. It explains why disabled children are more vulnerable, the barriers that allow abuse to go unnoticed, how to recognise the signs of harm without wrongly attributing them to a child’s disability, and how to respond and report correctly — set within the framework of Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE), Working Together to Safeguard Children, the Children Act 1989 and 2004, the Equality Act 2010 and the SEND provisions of the Children and Families Act 2014.