🏷️ From £90🎧 All who have responsibility and oversight responsibility of safer recruitment and regulatory compliance including safeguarding professionals and leaders, trustees, board members and governors, bursars, HR professionals📍 Online🎥 Watch live or on catch up

Course outline:

This session, led by Donny McCormick, Founder of Safeguarding HE, will explore student accommodation as a distinct safeguarding environment. It will cover the gaps between university responsibility and statutory authority, between policy and frontline practice, and between student autonomy and institutional duty.

A particular focus will be transition. Many resident-students arrive from school or college (FE) settings governed by Keeping Children Safe in Education. They move into an environment where they are usually treated as independent adults, often living away from home for the first time. The session will consider what is lost, and what may be missed, in that shift. It will also consider how the Prevent duty applies in residential settings. It will also examine what these mean for university-managed and privately operated accommodation, and for the staff who are often first to know, first to attend and first to be criticised.

Training topics will include:

• An overview of the current legal, regulatory and policy landscape for safeguarding in student accommodation, and the recurring points where risk falls between systems.
•  Transitional safeguarding from school and FE to HE. This covers the contrast between KCSIE-based arrangements and adult-focused HE approaches, the handling of under-18 residents, and the risks for students whose needs were known and supported before arrival but are not visible afterwards.
• The Prevent duty in accommodation settings. This covers recognising and responding to concerns about radicalisation, the relationship between Prevent and wider safeguarding, proportionality and freedom of expression, and referral routes.
• Common accommodation safeguarding scenarios, including mental health crises and welfare checks, disclosures of sexual misconduct and domestic abuse, disability-related behaviour, and under-18 and international residents.
• Strategies for proportionate, trauma-informed responses that respect adult autonomy while recognising vulnerability, power and foreseeable risk.
• Working with private accommodation providers, NHS services, local authorities and police, including what effective nominations agreements, information-sharing arrangements and escalation routes look like.

Learning outcomes:

• Delegates will have a clearer understanding of the legal, regulatory and practice context for safeguarding in student accommodation, including the limits of institutional responsibility.
• Delegates will be able to recognise how vulnerability is shaped by the residential environment itself, and apply graded thresholds to decisions about escalation, information-sharing and intervention.
• Delegates will consider how to strengthen partnership and multi-agency arrangements so that responsibility for serious risk is clearly held rather than dispersed.

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Speaker:

Donny McCormick Founder, Safeguarding HE

Donny McCormick is the founder of Safeguarding HE, a specialist consultancy providing safeguarding training and advisory support to the UK Higher Education sector. He brings over a decade of senior operational experience in student services, safeguarding and disability support, gained across universities and the private sector, and works with institutions to build safeguarding frameworks that are practical, legally sound and aligned with sector guidance. Donny’s recent projects include safeguarding reviews, assurance activity and policy development, supporting institutions to evaluate existing arrangements, clarify roles and responsibilities, and develop proportionate frameworks for managing risk. This work spans areas including under-18 provision, adults at risk, research activity, international engagement, student support and governance oversight. Donny also supports the Office of the Independent Adjudicator as a member of its Disability Experts Panel