The Campbell Academy Blog (90)

Obstacles in the way….

In the governor meeting in CP Riverside last week, which is the alternative provision school where I am the chair of governors (51 young people with very, very challenging lives trying to find a better track for a better future), we were discussing the onerous nature of safeguarding training concerning our work.

One of our governors is a safeguarding lead for her school as a teacher in her normal work (not a volunteering position like a governor).

Despite her extensive safeguarding training, all her certificates, and the hoops she's jumped through, she's still expected to do the low-level safeguarding training associated with our school and our Trust.

There is no route to exemption.

For my own account, I am safeguarding trained at my clinic as a healthcare professional, and I am the chairman of the group and currently, at least for a short while, still the clinical director; therefore, I have safeguarding responsibility and duty not only for the staff but for the patients who come through the practice.

I am also a football coach for West Bridgford Colts. I have a safeguarding responsibility and a relatively demanding amount of safeguarding and first aid training to be carried out in that volunteer position.

Add to that the fact that I'm now expected to continually update on my safeguarding at CP Riverside, and none of the other safeguarding that I do (or the DBS certificates) are valid and transferable.

So, I emailed the chief executive of the Trust of the school and asked him to investigate the possibility of allowing our governing body to transfer some of its external safeguarding qualifications and training into our portfolio in the school to demonstrate that we were safeguarded and trained.

That's not allowed apparently because it doesn't fulfil the criteria or tick the guidelines or some other form of bureaucracy, which is completely and utterly ridiculous, so we just have to, as they said in the email, 'suck it up'.

So, sucking it up is a slow death, isn't it? Because I cannot get people to volunteer to be governors at CP Riverside, I'm certainly not going to convince prospective ones by telling them about the onerous nature of their mandatory training online.

And so, everyone else sees an obstacle, and I know a way where it's possible to write a short letter to say that all of these other safeguarding qualifications are accepted as being valid. You will not have to duplicate them if you have them - a simple solution to save hours of time and achieve extraordinary goodwill.
On another note, and on the same day, I was discussing the impending robotic revolution in implant surgery, which is just heading down the road in front of us about two or three years away.

This will be linked to augmented reality (not virtual reality), and the early aspects of this are already well in play, and the pieces are on the board.

But when I discuss that with a group of dentists, they often just put barriers in the way as if to say, not in my lifetime or I won't be adopting this.

What I would ask them to look at is the integration of intraoral scanning in implant dentistry over the past ten years.

Ten years ago, we were leaving scanners lying out in the street for companies to collect them because they simply didn't work, and now, they are a critical element of our overall teaching and patient education, which will only improve and get better and better.

When we seek to change things, many people see an obstacle in the way, and that's OK.

Let them see that, but don't let you be the one that sees the obstacles in the way, be the one who sees the way around the obstacle or the passion and the excitement and the interest that lies on the other side of the obstacle that others cannot seem to see.