ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which whole-school approaches to safeguarding young people can create sites of safety, rather than abuse, for the young people who attend them. It also explores the characteristics of a whole-school approach. The chapter outlines that government guidelines play a role in setting the agenda, expectations and capabilities of schools, and in communicating their role in the safeguarding agenda. It also outlines the relationship that young people have with school staff, their fellow students and education policymakers is therefore one of dependency. Some of the young people that schools are trying to safeguard experience harm elsewhere – the effects of which are brought into the school environment. The chapter explores how significant a policy gap this is — and the extent to which school environments should feature more centrally within research, policy and practice concerned with peer-on-peer abuse specifically, and the welfare of adolescents more generally.
