Daily Safeguarding Update

Anti-vax group targets schoolchildren with misleading leaflets

A largely offline anti-vaccination campaign encouraging both schoolchildren and their parents to refuse the Covid-19 vaccine has been operating at UK school gates.
Misinformation detection organisation Logically found that Future Z has created online campaign materials in the style of BBC Bitesize revision guides designed to encourage vaccine hesitancy among children and teenagers.
The campaign likens accepting an mRNA vaccine – injections that protect against infectious diseases including Covid-19 – to installing “a trial app that could screw up your £800 iPhone” in a bid to convince younger people it is safer to wait than to receive a vaccination against the virus.
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Mobile phone bans and other ways to create “calm classrooms” are to be considered to help improve discipline in England’s schools.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said he wants to make the school day mobile-free, describing the devices as “distracting” and “damaging”.
A consultation will ask the views of teachers and parents on how to promote good behaviour.
Heads accused Mr Williamson of being “obsessed” with phones in school.
The six-week call for evidence is part of a government review of behaviour, discipline, suspensions, and permanent exclusions in England’s schools.
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Adopted children and young people in Wales are facing a “mental health emergency,” a charity has warned.
Adoption UK said two-thirds of adoptive families surveyed in Wales “face a continual struggle for support”.
Mimi Woods, 20, from Carmarthenshire, tried to take her own life as a teenager after being adopted aged three. She is calling for more support for people who have been adopted.
The Welsh government acknowledged “there is more to do”.
In a new report, the charity said the “mental health emergency” among adopted children and young people had been caused by “failings in a system that is not set up to meet their needs”.
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There has been a big increase in children in England missing large amounts of school – on top of disruption from Covid, warns a report.
More than 90,000 pupils missed over half their lessons in the autumn term, said the Centre for Social Justice.
They could be “extremely vulnerable to being picked up by gangs”, think tank founder Sir Iain Duncan Smith said.
The report warned these children would struggle to ever catch up when they were so “severely absent”.
“Gangs have used lockdowns for recruitment drives,” says the report, with a strong link between those who end up in youth custody and those who have been persistently absent from school.
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Hundreds of thousands of pupils will no longer have to automatically isolate after contact with a positive Covid case when schools return in September in England, ministers are expected to announce.
A quarter of a million children missed school in a single week because of coronavirus infections, self-isolation, or school closures this month – the most disrupted week since schools fully reopened across the country in March.
It came as the new health secretary, Sajid Javid, said most Covid restrictions in England “must come to an end” on 19 July.
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