The Safeguarding Children e-Academy is an innovative solution to enhance the learning process for those individuals and organisations who work with children.

The Every Child Matters initiative launched by the UK government in 2003, detailed a set of outcomes and frameworks to ensure that all children are safe, enjoy economic wellbeing, make a positive contribution, enjoy and achieve and are healthy. By facilitating a Community of Practice and providing high quality e-learning solutions, the Safeguarding Children e-Academy aims to work with organisations meet their safeguarding children training needs. 

Virtual College, (http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/) who are one of the UK's leading e-learning pioneers, provide the technology and support, together with a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Members of the Safeguarding Children e-Academy include organisations who have the Every Child Matters outcomes within their remit. By working in partnership, we offer a cost effective, member driven way of creating safeguarding e-learning resources specifically for use in this specialist sector.

Overview

There is a substantial education and training requirement for those who work with children. Roles are varied and differ in levels of specialism, but one thing is key: safeguarding children is everyone's business. Because of this, it can be difficult to reach all the people who need to be trained via the usual face-to-face routes alone. The e-Academy provides an opportunity to complement your traditional face-to-face delivery, by providing access to an excellent range of e-learning resources via a virtual learning environment. Geographical restrictions are therefore removed and consistency of both learning materials and assessment is ensured. When used as a pre-learning tool, e-learning can maximise the effectiveness of your face-to-face training by ensuring that all delegates have a good understanding of the underpinning knowledge, prior to attending.

Collaborative working

A key part of the e-Academy model is the fact that it brings together a number of members who share similar issues within the children's workforce sector. Our founder members sit on the Advisory Panel, which works as a powerful, focused team that ensure that the e-Academy aims focus on the latest guidelines and practices. Through collaborative working and peer review, we ensure that the e-learning solutions developed are mapped to the core standards and national performance indicators that our members must meet. In addition, the e-Academy plays an important role in helping facilitate the adoption of e-learning within member organisations, through benchmarking and sharing of best practice across the sector.

The Aim

The overarching aim of the e-Academy is to improve the education and training process for those individuals and organisations that work within and provide support to the children's workforce.

Our prime focus is to make strategic use of online solutions to help enhance the traditional approach to education and training. These solutions will be developed in cooperation with the Academy's members to ensure that they meet the required legislation and standards.