Beyond Compliance: How Chrisland is Building a Culture of Safety, Safeguarding

For children facing bullying, abuse or situations that make them feel unsafe, speaking up can be difficult. Some members of Chrisland Schools’ management team and its Designated Safeguarding Officers told journalists, including Funmi Ogundare, how the school is working to create an environment where learners feel safe reporting concerns and seeking help. They explained how initiatives such as its Safeguarding Week, confidential reporting channels, staff training and regular risk assessments are helping to make safety and child protection a shared responsibility among learners, parents and staff across the school’s campuses

For a child who is being bullied, feels unsafe or is struggling with a situation that they do not know how to handle, the hardest step can often be finding the courage to speak. At Chrisland Schools, the message during Safeguarding Week is simple: speak up, and someone will listen.

Across its 16 schools, the management is seeking to make safety and safeguarding more than rules contained in a handbook or instructions delivered during an assembly. It wants them to become part of how learners think, behave, and relate to others.

For the Head of Risk, Compliance, Safeguarding and Child Protection, Kemi Fajemirokun, the objective goes beyond satisfying regulatory requirements.

“Our focus is beyond compliance, embedding the whole school safety culture and safeguarding culture for positive character development in every learner,” she stated.

That philosophy is reflected in the school’s approach to safeguarding, which places learners, parents and staff at the centre of what Fajemirokun described as a ‘triangle of responsibility’.

“The children are focused on what they should do; the parents are focused on what they should do; and the teaching and non-teaching staff are also focused on what they should do,” she explained.

The approach is particularly important in a school environment where children spend a significant part of their formative years interacting with peers and adults. Rather than waiting for an incident to occur before responding, Fajemirokun said the school has deliberately built safety awareness into the everyday school experience.

For about seven years, the school has held a dedicated safety and safeguarding awareness week, using different themes each term to address emerging concerns and remind the entire school community of their responsibilities.

This year’s theme, ‘Beyond Compliance: Embedding the Whole School Safety Culture and Safeguarding Culture for Positive Character Development in Every Learner’, she noted, captures the school’s attempt to make safety instinctive.

Fajemirokun wants learners and staff to develop what she described as a safety mindset, an internal awareness of when an action could place them or another person at risk.

“We want it to become a culture where every learner, every staff member and every child has a mindset of safety and safeguarding in their DNA,  that I cannot do this thing because I am going to be vulnerable; I cannot do this thing because it is going to expose me to danger,” she said.

Every planned activity, Fajemirokun noted, must undergo a risk assessment before it receives clearance.

“We do risk management of all our processes every time. Before we do anything, we must assess the risks. Only after you have completed the risk assessment can you clear a school to proceed with whatever you have planned. This means safety considerations are expected to precede activities rather than being introduced after something goes wrong,” she explained.

One of the most significant elements of the safeguarding programme is creating safe channels for children to raise concerns.

At schools in Ikeja, Idimu and Festac, Victoria Island, Designated Safeguarding Officers (DSOs) said learners are encouraged to report bullying, abuse or anything that makes them uncomfortable. They, however, noted that reporting is not always easy. Some children may be afraid of being labelled a ‘snitch’. Others may fear retaliation from the person they have reported or worry that their peers will discover that they raised the alarm.

The schools therefore assured learners that confidentiality is central to the reporting process.

A designated safeguarding officer at Chrisland School, Opebi, Ikeja, Abimbola Taylor, explained that where a child was uncomfortable being identified, the matter could be treated as a general observation rather than attributed directly to the child. The objective, she said, was to ensure that “nobody will even trace it to whoever has reported”.

The system also recognises that not every child will be comfortable standing before an adult and narrating what happened. For such learners, safeguarding boxes have been provided where they can write down their concerns and submit them. The designated safeguarding officers then review the reports and take appropriate action.

“It is a small but significant shift: giving children not just instructions about staying safe, but different avenues through which they can ask for help,” Taylor said, adding that bullying is not acceptable, and every child has the right to express discomfort and seek protection.

The school’s safeguarding system does not end with awareness campaigns. Another DSO said incidents and concerns should be reported promptly, with a 24-hour window for escalation.

“Dedicated incident-reporting email channels operate around the clock, allowing staff to report concerns no matter how minor they may initially appear. Don’t take anything too small or too big. No matter what, within 24 hours,” she stated.

The Executive Head of School (Academics), Olusegun Ogunsola, said he believes that effective safeguarding must begin with a clear understanding of who the school exists to protect.

“The child is the focus of everything we do. The child is the focus, especially since he or she is in our care. So, we owe every child the duty of care,” he stated.

He noted that Chrisland has therefore invested in training staff in safety, safeguarding, child protection and risk compliance, with training provided through government agencies and external experts.

“Chrisland also brings specialised facilitators into the schools to strengthen staff capacity.  Safeguarding is not an annual conversation. It has to be reinforced continuously,” he stated.

Ogunsola added that assemblies, meetings, competitions and other school gatherings provide opportunities to remind learners about safety, while events include specific safety moments designed to make participants conscious of their surroundings, saying, “At such events, learners and staff are reminded of emergency exits, muster points and fire-drill areas.”

He said the school operates a unified safety and safeguarding calendar to ensure that learners receive consistent attention regardless of the school they attend. The second week of every term is dedicated to safeguarding awareness across the schools, with activities including talks, seminars, workshops and practical demonstrations.

External experts are also invited to engage learners on different dimensions of safety and child protection.

“Every school is as important as the other because every school is populated by children, and we owe everyone the duty of care and need to safeguard everybody,” the head of school said.

The Principal of Chrisland College, Idimu, Olubunmi Dosunmu, stated that the school is strengthening its safeguarding culture by making safety awareness and risk assessment a shared responsibility among staff, students and parents. He noted that the initiative was particularly important because the college operates a full boarding system, requiring more intensive supervision and deliberate safety measures to protect students around the clock.

He restated that safeguarding must become embedded in the consciousness of the entire school community rather than being treated as the responsibility of designated personnel alone. According to him, the school continuously assesses potential risks and reviews its systems to respond to changing circumstances, including periods when students remain on campus but have fewer academic activities.

“We build a strong safeguarding culture in our schools. The entire community, staff, students and parents need to have it in their subconscious about this subject,” he said.

Dosunmu explained that the boarding arrangement required the school to pay particular attention to what happens to students throughout the day and night, adding that supervision was therefore a major component of its safeguarding strategy.

He stated, “Because we are a full boarding school, we have to be more intensive and more intentional. We are looking at a system that works 24/7. We look at what happens to the children during the day and when they sleep at night, and what the possible changes in school are.”