"If everyone wore their SCARF, what a better place the world would be."
The words of a young pupil at Allerton Primary School sum up the ethos of its approach to creating a safe, supportive environment for learning.
Every youngster at the school wears the SCARF with pride - you can't always see it, but it's always there.
The letters stand for Safety, Caring, Achievement, Respect, Friendliness which collectively 'wrap around' pupils, like a real scarf, creating a sense of belonging that fosters achievement.
"If you wear this SCARF you will achieve well," says headteacher Sharon Lambert, who launched the project at Allerton Primary 20 years ago.
Connecting children, parents, staff and the wider community, it guides pupils through nursery and primary school and beyond.
This week Allerton Primary School is joining schools and organisations across the district for Safeguarding Week. Co-ordinated by Bradford Safeguarding Children and Adults boards, it highlights issues such as bullying, harassment, human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, e-safety, hate crime, teenage relationship abuse, personal safety, domestic violence, scams and doorstep crime, abuse of the elderly, disabled and LGBT communities and forced marriage.
The theme this year is 'Staying Safe: It's Everybody's Business'. Schools and colleges will have chance to showcase work they have developed around safeguarding issues including bullying, keeping safe online, and forming safe relationships.
To mark Safeguarding Week, Bradford Council is organising a writing competition for schoolchildren, highlighting issues they have learned about in school and supporting literacy objectives. The competition is one of the ways of raising the issue of safeguarding, which affects everyone, and urging people to take steps to safeguard themselves and others. Working with the theme 'It's Everybody's Business', children are encouraged to focus on their behaviour, and that of others, to ensure they stay safe.
"The competition is a great way of raising expectations of what is possible, from handwriting to the standard of work," says Sharon Lambert, headteacher of Allerton Primary School where safeguarding is an ongoing issue.
The 'S' in SCARF is crucial, says Sharon, in enabling children to keep themselves, and others around them, safe. And, she says, it all starts with making secure, trustworthy, potentially longterm friendships, right from nursery, where friends meet "across the sand tray".
"I firmly believe that trustworthy friend is the first person you can call on about anything," she says. "We have 30 different clubs, including a SCARF club, with activities geared towards making friends. Ours is a diverse school and whenever a child from another country arrives the most important thing to them is making friends.
"SCARF develops positive relationships, building children's trust and resilience. They should feel safe enough to share any concerns, if someone is 'mean' for example, and we have strategies on how to deal with that. Each member of staff makes a point of observing the children - in the classroom and the playground - so they know if something isn't quite right. It was noticed, for example, that a small number of children weren't connecting with others in the playground so we set up a conker club, meeting twice a week, and good relationships have come from this."
She adds: "We take a holistic approach to safeguarding; if children don't feel safe and secure, it's not the right environment for learning. It all starts with friendship - that creates the right learning environment."
SCARF has had good feedback from parents, who say it has had a positive impact on their children.
Now it is being rolled out across the UK after being taken on by Coram Life Education, a national organisation helping children make healthy life choices, through fun sessions in a mobile classroom with Harold, the Happy Health Giraffe. SCARF will be used to help schools develop personal social, health and economic education, encouraging children to build positive relationships, look after themselves and others and learn to reach their potential.
At Allerton Primary SCARF is introduced in the nursery, where a teddy bear is dressed in scarves made by pupils' grandparents. It becomes a metaphorical scarf which children wear all year round.
"We say if you come to school you have to wear your scarf. As they move on to secondary school, peer support comes into play," says Sharon. "It's about knowing what's good and bad behaviour and having the resilience to speak up. This could be about someone raising their voice, to something more serious."
Safeguarding Week was launched yesterday at an event at Bradford College attended by Steve Hartley, vice chairman of the Domestic and Sexual Violence Strategic Board, West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Mark Burns-Williamson, councillors, senior leaders, managers and practitioners from across the district. Activities included a performance called Breaking the Silence by Bradford College students, and the launch by Bradford People First of an online resource covering hate crime and abuse.
Jonathan Phillips, independent chairman of the Bradford Safeguarding Adults Board, said: "A central theme of Safeguarding Week 2015 is communication and a series of events has been created to cover this important issue. The week helps us to raise awareness of ways in which we can help make the lives of adults and children safer.”
David Niven, independent chairman of Bradford Safeguarding Children Board, added: "Safeguarding Week is an important way in which we can bring professionals together to share ideas so that we can make the lives of children safer. Safeguarding is everybody’s business, and we all have a role to play in making our community a safer place to live and work.”
Councillor Ralph Berry, executive member for children's and adults' services, said: "Everyone in the community has an important role in helping to make the district a safe place to live and work. Safeguarding Week provides an important way to make professional practice more effective by learning from each other. It represents a great opportunity for the council, police and health services to work together to ensure that children and adults in the district live safely.”
West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Mark Burns-Williamson said: “Bradford Safeguarding Week is a very important event and one that I give my support to. I look forward to discussing with key partners what more we can do to safeguard people.”