Children First training
Is Tusla's free e-learning enough?
It is the question Irish organisations ask most often about Children First, and the honest answer depends on what your risk assessment found.
What the Children First Act 2015 asks of you
Training is one of several things.
Tusla's module is titled Introduction to Children First. The clue is in the name: it introduces the Children First Act 2015, and it is free, and a great many organisations have completed it and stopped there.
The Children First Act 2015 asks for more than one thing. A provider of relevant services to children requires a written assessment of risk, a child safeguarding statement naming the procedures that manage each risk it finds, those procedures actually existing, a designated liaison person, and appropriate information, instruction and training for staff and volunteers.
Completing a module satisfies none of the first four. And what counts as appropriate for the fifth is decided by your own risk assessment — so an organisation that has not done that assessment cannot yet say whether any course is enough, including Michael's.
The written risk assessment
Every element of your service where there is a risk of harm to a child. No course produces this for you, and everything else follows from it.
The statement and the procedures
Displayed where you operate, available to any parent who asks, naming procedures that have to exist in fact.
A designated liaison person
Named in the statement, and prepared for the decisions the role actually brings.
Training that fits the risk
Appropriate to what your assessment found, and recorded so you can show what was covered rather than only that it happened.
What an introduction cannot do
It can tell you what somebody knows.
An online module ending in multiple choice measures recall on the day. That is worth having, and it is not the same as knowing whether a person would act.
Best practice in safeguarding training goes further than an introduction: it involves discussion, applied judgement, and some assessment of how somebody would respond to a real situation — particularly the ambiguous ones, which are the ones that actually arrive.
Answers
The questions underneath Tusla's e-learning.
What is Tusla's free e-learning called?
Introduction to Children First. It is a free online module produced by Tusla and it is a sound introduction to the Children First Act 2015 and to recognising a concern.
Does completing Tusla's e-learning satisfy the Children First Act 2015?
The Children First Act 2015 requires an organisation to provide appropriate information, instruction and training to staff and volunteers. It does not name a specific course. What is appropriate for your organisation follows from your own written risk assessment, which is the document that decides this rather than any course provider.
What does best practice look like beyond an introduction?
Discussion, applied judgement, and some assessment of how a person would respond to a real situation. An introduction tells somebody what the categories are; it cannot tell you whether they would act when the person involved is a colleague.
Do we need to train volunteers as well as staff?
If they work with children, yes. Your risk assessment should identify every element of your service where there is a risk of harm, and volunteers are frequently the people closest to it.
How often should staff be retrained?
There is no interval set in the Children First Act 2015. Most organisations settle on every two or three years, and record it, because a training record with no dates is difficult to stand over.
Who you would be working with
Fifteen years leading Ireland's national child protection unit.
Senior Investigating Officer with An Garda Síochána, leading three national units: the National Child Protection Unit, the Sexual Crime Management Unit and the Online Child Exploitation Unit. Ireland's National Expert to Interpol and Europol on child safeguarding.
Safeguarding policy developed with Tusla, the HSE and three government departments. M.Sc. in Child Protection and Welfare, Trinity College Dublin. More about Michael
do what you love, safely
Organisations Michael has worked with
Tusla
HSE
United Nations
Interpol
European Commission
GAA
Scouting Ireland
Teaching Council
Dublin Rape Crisis Centre
CARI
Irish Red Cross
DSPCA
St John Ambulance
UCD
Trinity College Dublin
ERA — Academy of European LawThe first conversation
Thirty minutes. No cost.
If you are unsure whether your training is sufficient, half an hour usually settles it. Michael will tell you what your organisation needs, including if what you already do is enough.
- Whether your risk assessment supports your current training
- What appropriate looks like for your kind of organisation
- What it would cost to close any gap, and what it would not