Parish Safeguarding Officers are an integral part of our church family, supporting work with children, young people and vulnerable adults across a range of activities. Margaret Clark is just one of these dedicated volunteers who enable this work to go ahead.
Margaret has a great deal of experience working with adults who need extra support as she has run Shine, a ministry for adults with additional needs at Banbury St Paul’s for the past 11 years.
She said: “To keep our friends at Shine safe is a high priority for me as well as for them to hear about Jesus and to feel loved and accepted. When the safeguarding officer role came up it seemed almost like a natural progression to take on that and be involved in safeguarding for children’s ministry as well.”
The work of a PSO includes safely recruiting volunteers for activities, ensuring their training is up to date, and dealing with any safeguarding issues that arise. Added to this, Margaret supports volunteers to fill in their Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) forms every three years, maintains the ‘dashboard’ which tracks the training needs of volunteers and monitors standards and mandatory requirements.
Margaret said: “My primary responsibility is to ensure all members of St Paul’s Church are protected, that’s my number one. As people walk into our church building I want them to see that we take safeguarding seriously in our church.
“So they’ll see a safeguarding notice when they walk into the porch and when they go into the church they will see pictures of all of the leadership team because we want people to know we have a very open culture here at St Paul’s. We want it to be very obvious at our church that we care about people, especially the vulnerable.
“A church that is doing safeguarding well is a church which communicates. Our church family are told when the PCC are meeting and can view the minutes of the meetings. A church with an open culture, which I think we have, is a church that takes its safeguarding very seriously. It is a shared responsibility, and it is top down, from the vicar and the PCC to all its members.
“Every year the PCC must approve all the activities our church does. This year it is 20 activities, many of these involve children or vulnerable adults. I oversee the safeguarding for all these activities. It is lovely for me to know these are going ahead, exciting things, and I know we have done our utmost to ensure people are safe.”
Key to the success Margaret’s role is the support she receives from the safeguarding team at Church House. Each of the episcopal areas have their own safeguarding adviser who can offer a listening ear and a sounding board when required and more formal support when a difficult situation occurs.
Margaret added: “A safeguarding officer can feel very much on your own if you’re dealing with a tricky situation. It is really important to have someone I can contact who responds quickly and who listens and offers sound advice. I am blessed to have the support of an excellent Safeguarding adviser.”
She ends by saying: “My work as a safeguarding officer is my service to our church family but also to the Lord. In all I do, He is my guide, my rock and my strength.”