We are committed to providing you with a safe and secure environment at New College Durham.
Safeguarding and Prevent
Safeguarding our students, staff and visitors is an important issue to us.
Safeguarding means:
- Promotion of your health and development
- Ensuring your safety and care
- Ensuring you are offered the best life chances
- Protection from abuse and neglect
- Prevention of bullying and harassment
The term safeguarding embraces both children and adults at risk, protection and preventative approaches to keep our students, staff and visitors safe. Safeguarding encompasses students’ health and safety, welfare and well-being.
New College Durham is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people, and adults at risk. We all have a role to play in safeguarding. If you are ever worried about someone, or would like help yourself, please alert a member of staff and they will deal with the situation following College guidelines and procedures.
Any student who wishes to discuss any concern or query relating to safeguarding should report these concerns to either a tutor or one of the College’s Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL), each of whom has the responsibility to act as a source of support and has expertise within the College to support you to address these concerns.
Prevent
Another aspect of safeguarding is the PREVENT Duty, which requires the further education sector to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’, supporting terrorism or being drawn into non-violent extremism.
The Government has defined extremism as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British Values” which include:
- Individual liberty
- Rule of law
- Democracy
- Mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs
There is no place for extremist views of any kind at New College Durham.
It is imperative that our students see our college as a safe place to learn, where they can discuss
and explore controversial issues safely and in an unbiased way and where our staff encourage and facilitate this.
As a college we recognise that extremism and exposure to extremist materials and influences can lead to poor outcomes for our students. We also recognise that if we fail to challenge extremist views, we are failing to protect our students.
As part of New College Durham’s commitment to safeguarding, we have developed an online safeguarding portal. The portal will allow staff, students and partner organisations to view key information and documents relating to Safeguarding and Prevent.
Access the New College Durham Safeguarding Portal
Bullying and Harassment
Bullying or harassment is behaviour that hurts another individual.
There is no legal definition of bullying. However, it is usually defined as behaviour that is:
- Repeated
- Intended to hurt someone either physically or emotionally
- Often aimed at certain groups, for example because of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
It takes many forms and can include:
- Physical assault
- Teasing
- Making threats
- Name calling
- Cyberbullying- bullying via any device, app or online (for example email, social networks or instant messages)
What is harassment?
Harassment is unwanted conduct which violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. Harassment may arise from a series of events or an isolated incident against one or more individuals and is defined largely by the impact of the behaviour on the recipient not its intention.
Harassment may be:
- Physical- contact, assault or gestures, intimidation, aggressive behaviour
- Verbal- unwelcome jokes, remarks, suggestions and propositions, malicious gossip, nicknames
- Non-verbal- offensive literature or pictures, graffiti and computer imagery, isolation or exclusion from social activities
- Bullying- offensive, abusive, intimidating or insulting behaviour
Please report any concern about bullying or harassment to either a tutor or one of the College’s Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL), each of whom has the responsibility to act as a source of support and has expertise within the College to support you to address these concerns.
If you don’t feel that you can do this, please contact the Advice Support Careers team via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on 0191 375 4400.
For further guidance check the College’s Safeguarding Portal
Sexual violence and sexual harassment (including online)
The College is committed to ensuring a working and learning environment free from sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and sexual violence so all members of the College community can enjoy the right to study, live, work and be respected for the contribution they make.
Sexual violence and sexual harassment are specific forms of abuse that have been identified as a concern in the lives of young people. In some areas, the frequency of these sexual behaviours means that some young people consider them normal. In a lot of cases these actions can occur between peers.
Sexual violence refers to sexual offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Sexual harassment means unwanted conduct of a sexual nature and may be:
- Sexual jokes or taunting
- Sexist name calling
- Sexualised language
- Physical behaviour such as deliberately brushing against someone
- Online sexual harassment
- Consensual sharing and non-consensual sharing of nude images and videos- taking and sharing of nude photographs of under 18s is a criminal offence
- Sharing unwanted explicit sexual material
- Being pressurised to send nude pictures (nudes)
- Upskirting- a criminal offence
- Sexualised online bullying
- Unwanted sexual comments and messages, including on social media
- Sexual exploitation, coercion and threats
- Sexual violence both within and outside of College
New College Durham does not tolerate these actions and works within internal procedures, including the student disciplinary procedure, and with external agencies to take action and offer support.
The College adopts a whole-college approach to develop a culture where all kinds of sexual violence, sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are recognised and addressed.
- We all have a role to play in this and will achieve this by:
- Staff and students role model respectful and appropriate behaviour
- Students are clear about what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour
- Students are confident to ask for help and support when it is needed
If you are a victim of sexual violence or harassment, which is either ongoing or historical in nature, we would encourage you to make a disclosure to any College staff or specifically one of the College’s Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL), who will provide a safe place for you to be heard, offering free support and advice to any student who has been impacted by sexual harassment or violence.
For further guidance check the College’s Safeguarding Portal
Keeping College Safe Contacts
If you are in the College you can report these concerns to either your tutor or one of the College’s Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs), each of whom has the responsibility to act as a source of support, and has expertise within the college to support you to address these concerns. There may be issues you wish to report to external agencies (e.g. police) so to aid you in deciding who to report concerns to you may wish to view our Safeguarding Reporting Process – this has the added advantage of providing access to a range of external helplines, which supplements the support available by the College.
Please note that Safeguarding and/or Prevent concerns do not need to relate to College work/ activities.
The College recognise that it needs to refine reporting options to those students who are not located on the College main site or are on work placement. Hence, if you have any concerns simply click on ‘Report a Safeguarding Concern’ button and then complete the form. You can then submit this form to the college for consideration by a DSL.
How you report such a concern is entirely up to you, you can contact a DSL, talk to your tutor/ a member of staff or use the link – what is important is that you report any concerns so we can support you.