Resources to safeguard children and young people with disability
Every child and young person has the right to feel safe, be heard and be treated with dignity and respect. Children and young people with disability can face additional barriers to participation, communication and reporting concerns. This makes it even more important that the adults and organisations around them actively promote and protect their safety and wellbeing.
The National Principles for Child Safe Organisations (the National Principles) provide a nationally consistent framework to help create environments where children and young people are safe, valued and empowered. Implementing these principles is a shared responsibility that extends across organisations, leaders, workers, volunteers, parents, caregivers and communities.
To support the implementation of the National Principles, we have developed resources for the different groups of people within a child or young person’s life who help to safeguard them.
Whether you are leading organisational change, delivering services and supports, working directly with children and young people or supporting a child as a parent or caregiver, these tailored resources can help you understand your role and strengthen child safe practices.
Social Script Toolkit
A practical toolkit to support organisations to develop and use social scripts with Autistic and neurodivergent children and young people.
A social script is a text-based story accompanied by pictures. It explains in a clear way situations or events that a child or young person may find challenging to understand. Social scripts can be useful for having safety conversations when children and young people are engaging with an organisation.
The toolkit includes:
- information on creating effective social scripts, including on safeguarding related topics
- example social scripts
- a planning checklist to help tailor scripts to individual needs and organisational settings.
These resources were developed for us by Amaze Inc.
For organisations, parents and caregivers.
Communication boards
A collection of safeguarding-themed communication boards designed to support meaningful and accessible conversations with children and young people with disability.
The boards cover topics such as:
- consent
- personal boundaries
- body autonomy
- recognising unsafe situations
- identifying trusted adults
- speaking up about concerns.
The communication boards aim to support organisations communicate child safety messages in an inclusive way.
To support our communication boards, we also have an Information and instructions booklet.
These resources were developed for us by Embrace Access.
For organisations, parents and caregivers.
To order hard copies of these resources, contact us at NationalOfficeforChildSafety@ag.gov.au.