Lloyd Park Children's Charity
Safeguarding at the heart of everything
Lloyd Park Children's Charity has been part of Waltham Forest for over 40 years. Its mission is to build brighter futures for children and families, with equity at the heart of everything it does. The charity works to identify the children and families who would most benefit from support and then provides that support in a way that makes sense to the individual, using co-production and partnership working to shape services around what local people say they actually need.
The scale of what the charity delivers is considerable. It runs two childcare settings and delivers children and family centre services across Waltham Forest on behalf of the local authority, with hubs in Chingford, Leyton, Leytonstone and Walthamstow. Alongside this, it operates a baby bank, a grow wild adventure play space, a ready for school outreach project, early years social prescribing, and family support programmes, with around 119 staff reaching close to 10,000 people last year.
Much of this work is actively targeted at the families facing the greatest disadvantage, whether through poverty, special educational needs, developmental delay, or health challenges in the home.
As Wendy Fields, Chief Executive, describes it,
“the predictions you can make about a child's future life chances at the age of two are stark and tackling that social injustice, giving every child the opportunity to thrive regardless of their starting point, is what drives everything the charity does.”
Wendy Fields - Chief Executive
"We are actively looking at engaging vulnerable, disadvantaged families all of the time," says Wendy. "It is essential for anyone working with children that safeguarding is at the heart of everything they do. ISS provides exactly the support we were looking for, to help us maintain high standards of safeguarding in a landscape that is constantly changing."
Wendy Fields - Chief Executive
A unique safeguarding responsibility
"We're a little bit unique in the sense that it's not just early years safeguarding we're looking at — we're looking at children and family centre safeguarding as well."
Keri Cooper - Head of Safeguarding
Standard safeguarding frameworks tend to be built around school settings and do not reflect the breadth of what Lloyd Park Children’s Charity does or the range of contexts in which its staff work.
Keri said:
“The Independent Safeguarding Service (ISS) provided a comprehensive model safeguarding policy, which we have adopted to reflect the specific structure, services, and evolving needs of our organisation, while ensuring it remains appropriate to our local authority context.”
Keri Cooper - Head of Safeguarding
Finding ISS
"I was looking for an organisation to work with us. We have a similar sort of service with our health and safety, so training and audits, and we were looking for something with safeguarding and I couldn't find it."
Wendy Fields - Chief Executive
Training and support built around the organisation
"The audit goes beyond compliance. It's not just checking schools are compliant with the regulations. It looks at culture in our schools. It looks at best practice in various areas, so it's extremely thorough. Whilst it is rigorous, the schools know that if they want advice, they can get help with improving their practice or how to address challenges."
Keri Cooper - Head of Safeguarding
"Independent Safeguarding Services has delivered a lot of training for us, whether it's been bespoke training where they've come to us and met our teams, or Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) training specifically for our organisation, and it has been exceptional,"
Keri Cooper - Head of Safeguarding
says Keri.
What Keri values most is the way ISS shapes everything around how the charity works and what it is aiming for, making safeguarding fit the organisation rather than the other way around. The result, she says, is seamless. Recent whole-staff training drew over 113 members of staff and held their engagement throughout a full day, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon.
Regular audits generate action plans. Policy reviews generate action plans. It is a model built for continuous improvement rather than periodic compliance, and one that reflects a shared set of values between both organisations.
"It's not only the services that ISS offer," says Wendy. "It's the way they offer the services, and how containing they are. I have full faith in their expertise and in their commitment to safeguarding."
Keri Cooper - Head of Safeguarding
"Anyone working with children and families should access ISS. I think a lot of organisations don't know about them and don't understand the tangible differences they support you to make."
Wendy Fields - Chief Executive
