Child Safety Standards April 2024 update

Spotlight on Standard 9: We regularly review our child safety progress

Regular reviews of our child safety practice help us to see what we are doing well and where improvement is needed. Continuous improvement helps to ensure our children are as safe as possible at church for worship, fellowship, and all other activities.

Ways that we can do this in our congregations:

• We talk about issues of child safety at our leadership meetings. Issues may include incidents that have happened or nearly happened at church. It is important to reflect on what happened, why it happened and how we can prevent it from happening again.
• Our church leadership receives and reviews reports quarterly regarding working with children type checks and completion of Safe Church Training. Our leadership supports Safe Church Coordinators with keeping compliance records up to date.
• We regularly assess our child safety practice and submit a Child Safety Plan for our congregation to Professional Standards every three years. We do this more frequently if we go through a period of growth or notable change.
• We carefully review the results of each assessment and look for ways to close any gaps in safety that our assessor has identified.
• We implement and review the Child Safety Plan, ensuring that next steps are actioned in a timely fashion.
• We share with the wider community in positive ways about our child safety progress in our newsletters or other publications, at our AGM and before or after worship.

 Child Safety Plans

If your congregation has not yet submitted a Child Safety Plan for 2022–23, we are still accepting online submissions – click here for more details.

The next submission of your Child Safety Plan will be due in 2025 – please watch LCA eNews for announcements about submission dates.