When an allegation’s been made about a member of staff, the school must consider whether to suspend that member of staff. It’s not an automatic decision. They will base that decision on risk, and the risk is to the child, to other children, and to the member of staff as well. Because when they’re considering it, they’re going to consider option 1 – ‘the status quo’, stay exactly as it is, that that member of staff is still teaching, working with children, still in the school.

They may decide, actually, that they can manage the risk by providing an extra member of staff. Therefore, that adult is not left alone with any children. Or that their role changes so they’re not in a position that they’re working with the children on a daily basis.

Once that decision is made, whether they are going to suspend or not, if they do suspend you have to remember it’s a neutral decision. It’s not saying you’re guilty one way or the other. However, I’ll be honest with you, it does not feel like a neutral decision.

Because the first thing that happens in a community is that lots of people start asking questions, saying, “Where’s the member of staff?” And, unfortunately, the school – due to it being an ongoing situation, is unable to answer those questions.

So do remember that it is neutral. If you are suspended from work, again, a member of staff should be provided for you to help you through the process. If you’ve got any questions, you can ask them. Also, lots of authorities do have counselling sessions that are available, because this is going to be a very, very stressful time for yourself. So do make sure that you find out those options.

The information will go to what we call a Section 5. So, a Section 5, as I said, is part of the safeguarding procedures, and what this involves is meetings where the agencies come together. Somebody from education, children’s services, police, health, and they’ll discuss what information they’ve got.

From that, they’ll work out whether they need any extra information in order to make a decision. Police will decide if it a case they’re going to investigate, if it reaches their thresholds for a criminal aspect to it. If it is, then the police will investigate, either by themselves or may include children’s services with that as well.

There may be children that need to be interviewed, i.e. they’ll go by what we call a Section 47 interview and inquiry. All that information will keep coming back to the professional strategy meetings. And they will continue until a decision is made at the end.

The decision that will come out of that strategy meeting is four options, four outcomes as we call them. The first one is that the accusation, the allegation, is ‘unfounded’, no evidence to prove that it occurred.

So, what you could have, examples are that, you know, people may say, “My child was manhandled or was dragged” somewhere. And when you actually look at the CCTV evidence, what you’ll see is that actually a member of staff has escorted the child away from a fight. Therefore, the evidence is clear, showing us that there’s no allegation against them. Actually, we’d be more worried if they did not split the fight up. So, thinking about things like that with ‘unfounded’.

There is also another one, because ‘unfounded’ means that the person’s made the actual disclosure thinking that there was abuse that happened. The other one is what we class as ‘malicious’. So this is deliberately invented or malicious, and here we need to also consider, why did the person do that? And have a look and see if they need support at that point as well.

The other two, ‘substantiated,’ i.e. there is enough evidence to prove that it did occur, on the level of probability is what we’re looking at here. The police look at a different burden of proof. They look at ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, is what they’re looking at for a criminal prosecution, to decide that it’s worth taking to the CPS and going forward in a criminal prosecution. But for this, and ‘disciplinaries’, we are looking at ‘balance of probabilities’. Did it happen? And, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, what’s the likelihood?

The other one is where it’s ‘unsubstantiated’. Now this is where some people get confused. ‘Unsubstantiated’ just means that there isn’t enough evidence to prove one way or the other. Some think because it’s unsubstantiated or the police have taken no further action that, therefore, it didn’t happen. That’s not what ‘unsubstantiated’ is saying.

‘Unsubstantiated’ just means that what we could have, we’ve got a version from a child, we’ve got a version from a member of staff and, unfortunately, there’s no other witness, no CCTV, there’s nothing else that can be used to prove which one version-wise has the most probability of having occurred.

So it comes back then to the employer. As the employer, what the school must decide is to work out whether there are disciplinary action. So although the case may not have gone forwards in a safeguarding manner, there could still be disciplinary procedures that need to be considered due to the actions of that member of staff.

And there they’re comparing you to the Education Workforce Council’s Code of Conduct, to the Staff Behaviour Policy or their Code of Conduct, social media. It depends what the accusation is. If the school decide that they are going to go down the ‘disciplinary’, due to the ‘Clywch’ report that was mentioned earlier, an independent investigation has to occur, because there’s been concerns about safeguarding. So it can’t just be an internal school investigation. It has to go external for that point.