Three Questions for Your Next ARC Meeting

Testing whether safeguarding is genuinely visible within your governance architecture does not require a full review. It can start with three questions at your next ARC meeting.   

1. When did safeguarding last change the agenda of a meeting it wasn’t already on?

If safeguarding only ever appears where it is scheduled to appear, that is worth noticing. Genuine visibility means it can surface unexpectedly, prompted by something a committee member has seen, heard or been told, rather than only through the established reporting cycle.   

2. Who would notice if two departments’ safeguarding reports painted different pictures?

Reports rarely arrive side by side for direct comparison. Ask whether anyone’s role currently involves looking across what different functions are reporting, or whether each report is simply received, noted and filed.   

3. What is the newest safeguarding risk this institution now carries that wasn’t relevant three years ago?

Governance architecture built around stable, familiar risks can struggle to register genuinely new ones. An ARC that cannot identify a recent addition should ask whether its governance processes are keeping pace with how safeguarding risk is changing.  

None of these questions requires new data or a formal review to answer. What they require is a willingness to notice where the answer is uncertain, and to treat that uncertainty as information in its own right.