Each year, safeguarding requirements on schools increase. Updates to Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) legislation have introduced more comprehensive vetting checks, audit trails, and identification verification requirements.

The result is that it is more time consuming and complex for schools to manage their Single Central Record. And while it's possible to get by with a manual spreadsheet, there are risks and challenges with doing so.

As the Single Central Record is your first line of defence in school safeguarding, it lays the foundations for the rest of your school. Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your SCR management is the goal. Together, let's explore how SCR software can help you do that.

In this post, we'll cover how SCR software can:

• Improve school safeguarding and compliance
• Save time by improving efficiency with SCR software
• Improve data security with SCR software
• Reduce overhead costs and have long-term impact

Improve school safeguarding and compliance

Maintaining accurate and comprehensive records is the first order of business when it comes to your single central record.

A major feature of School SCR software is that it automatically audits every record and staff member. If an error or gap is identified in your records, it's flagged instantly.

This benefits your school in two key ways.

The first is that it's easier to meet increasingly granular record keeping requirements. Keeping audit trails with dates against undertaken checks and verified documents can be time-consuming. Software makes this simple by time-stamping entries to produce a comprehensive audit trail for you.

The second is that SCR software makes it easier to manage various staff types. Most schools are confident when it comes to adding employed staff to their SCR. Recording governor, trustee or contractor information is more complex, with different vetting requirements in place for each group.

This is before we consider volunteers, agency staff, and pre-starters, all of whom should be part of your single central record. There's a lot to manage and software can really lighten the workload.

When you add a new person to School SCR, the software automatically references against the current KCSIE requirements.

If all required data is present, the data fields light up green. If the software identifies an issue, then you see a red cross where the problem is. Reflecting your level of compliance in this visual manner means it's easy to fix issues. This helps you to maintain 100% compliance at all times.

Each of these features help improve your school's compliance, but more importantly, they help make it a safer place.

Save time by improving efficiency with SCR software

Reducing the number of manual tasks involved in managing your SCR is the quickest way to free up time. Time that can be reinvested into more active safeguarding work if you choose.

It is best practice to read over the ones that are relevant to your school in order to ensure you're fully compliant.

SCR software helps automate 3 sets of tasks to reduce your workload.

The first is in undertaking staff vetting checks. School SCR is integrated with Verifile, one of the UK's leading DBS services. This enables you to order a range of personnel checks all from within your School SCR platform. From Enhanced DBS through to the Children's Barred List checks, you're able to order in just a few clicks.

The second process is keeping track of dates and knowing when to order replacement checks. The notification system automatically alerts you when the time is drawing near. This reduces the need to review your SCR so frequently or to manually enter renewal dates into your calendar.

The third process is reviewing your single central record. School SCR audits your record keeping in real-time, alerting you to issues immediately. When it comes to your termly SCR review, you should find that it's quicker than ever before.

Together, these features improve efficiency for your school, potentially resulting in hours of manual work savings each week.

Improve data security with SCR software

One of the overlooked benefits of moving to SCR software is how it improves your school data security.

The single central record holds highly sensitive personnel information and schools have a legal obligation to protect this data. In this area, relying on a manual online spreadsheet SCR comes with risks.

This sensitive nature of SCR data means it must be password protected. Ideally you should encrypt the data and you might want to think about ensuring 2-factor authentication is in place. It's also important to run regular backups. If a school loses their single central record, Ofsted have the power to instantly downgrade their judgement.

Staff access controls are important. If you're sharing your online SCR spreadsheet via email, one typo could result in sharing it with the wrong person. That may constitute a serious data breach and could land your school in legal trouble.

When a school doesn't have their own IT or network team, meeting these technological requirements can be very difficult.

You might say that these scenarios sound far fetched, and debate whether you really need to think about this. When it comes to data protection compliance, the penalties for even a single breach or mistake can be severe. The goal should be to minimise the likelihood of any issue ever happening. In this area, it's better to be safe than sorry.

School SCR software solves all of these problems for you. Password protected, with the ability to enforce 2-factor authentication, software can improve access security for your school. Bank grade 256-bit SSL encryption ensures your data is protected to the highest standards. Regular backups reduce the risk of data loss.

Role-based access makes it simple and secure to share your single central record with governors and other staff. Something that helps improve oversight and your wider school safeguarding culture.

When it comes to MATs and educational groups, the group dashboard can centralise each school's SCR data into one single place. This improves oversight and group wide compliance. No need to email documents back and forth. No additional work required.

Reduce overhead costs and have long-term impact

The benefits are clear, but as with many things in education, cost is a key factor.

At School SCR, our prices start from £350 per school, which means it costs less than £1 per day.

You bolster your single central record processes, improving compliance while saving time along the way. It's a win-win situation and the more staff you have, the greater the benefits. The more staff you have, the more time savings you can make with School SCR.