Culture through Compliance
Audit and Action Plan

While we know that compliance alone will not change every behaviour, it is an important basis on which to build your healthy safeguarding culture.

The Culture through Compliance Audit focuses on your existing policies, systems and ways of doing things, so that you can identify where your current practice may not meet recognised standards, and take action to address this.

Although completing the Culture through Compliance Audit is not a requirement before conducting an Organisational Culture Assessment, we recommend you undertake it first. This provides you with an important initial assessment of your governance, legal compliance and the health and strength of your safeguarding foundations and culture.

The leadership team should complete this Audit together during a meeting. It should take around 45 minutes to complete.

Ideally you should assign one person to facilitate the discussions, and one person to record your collective answers - this can be the same person. If your safeguarding lead is not part of your leadership team, we recommend that you invite them to the meeting as an observer. We suggest that they answer each question last, as they may have more knowledge of your organisation's safeguarding arrangements, and it is important for you to secure a true assessment of your whole leadership team’s current understanding of your organisation’s safeguarding provision.

Completion of the tool will generate an action plan for the leadership team at three levels: 

• Priority actions to tackle immediately
• Medium-term actions for the next year
• Long-term actions for the next 2 years

The resulting action plan is designed to support long term system strengthening, taking your organisation on a journey whereby sustainable changes can be made that contribute to creating a healthy safeguarding culture. 

If you would like a preview of the questions, or to complete the self-audit in a word document rather than digitally, download the paper version of the self-audit here. Please note, you will only receive a bespoke action plan if you submit your audit responses online.