Cambridgeshire Constabulary
Ethics Playing Cards
Copyright © 2025 Compass Ethics
8
You are aware of a potential incident in a school that your children attend and where your partner also teaches. What can you share with them?
Case Studies
- A vetting process has been concluded after the appointment of a new teacher, and questions about the new person have been raised. They are already in the classroom. What do you do?
Discussion
Schools are clearly ‘positions of trust’ and as such attract extra safeguarding processes and frameworks.
- What type of questions have been raised and how do you know this information? E.g. is it 1st or 2nd hand?
- How do you cope when you are aware of information that has a direct impact on people you know?
- What if it is actually family members? Does it make a difference? What about if it affects your own children?
- Keeping the boundaries between your personal and professional life can be extremely hard, how have you dealt with such issues in the past, and how have colleagues dealt with this in the past?
- Where might someone seek advice from their organisation to help them work through this kind of dilemma?
- An officer MUST retain confidentiality, and failing to do so would be a specific breach within the SPB.
- LADO – the local area designated officer works in the safeguarding arena and can be contacted to share concerns. This could provide a path forwards (e.g. this could lead to re-vetting or further investigation, etc).
As a police officer or someone working with the police you will often have access to information that has not yet been and may not be shared with the general public. There are good operational reasons for keeping information related to lines of inquiry restricted. Regular family safeguarding conversations can be used to discuss a variety of important matters, but there are still limits on what information may be shared.