While CPOMS helps schools save time and streamline safeguarding practices, the system also does so much more that some schools aren’t aware of.
Schools which learn how to make the best of the features of CPOMS save a great deal of time and effort further down the line, and undoubtedly improve their safeguarding recording and monitoring. We’ll run through three of the best ways to get the most from the system here.
One feature for example is customising the categories you can log to enable the logging and reporting of health and safety information, and indeed any type of information you’d like to have on the system.
The colourful categories listed down the left side of your front CPOMS page are initially what the school first requested during the setup stage, but you can add further categories or sub-categories at any time by pressing the Admin and then Categories buttons from the top menu.
From there you can type in exactly what you’d like a new category to be called and it will be available to log against, and run reports on from then on.
Schools have used that feature very effectively, particularly with health and safety to log incidents such as accidents, medicine administration and other concerns. As the categories are fully customisable you can log SEN, attendance concerns, parental communication, attainment interventions and anything else you would benefit from having on the system.
One major benefit of logging a range of information like this is the illustration of the chronology on a student’s Incident Timeline. This can be accessed by pressing on the students name to see their Overview, and going to the bottom right of the screen. The timeline here shows all incidents logged on this individual’s chronology in a more visual format, so you can look into causation or a build up of seemingly low level incidents over a short period of time that may reveal something more serious.
Another relatively new feature that can save a huge amount of time in school is found within the Library section. If you upload a file like your safeguarding policy or keeping children safe in education to the library, you can alert all staff in school that you have done so, meaning you’ll also have a list showing exactly when each member of staff received the message telling them to read the document, and confirmation of if and when they’ve opened the document.
They can also mark it as read to show that they’ve completed reading the document in the same way staff may sign to say they’ve read something currently.
There are a huge number of other features that CPOMS has enabled in recent years, and if you feel you would benefit from learning more about those features you have a couple of options.
Firstly we’ll be explaining more about them in upcoming newsletters, but as ever, you can contact our ServicePoint team on our office number 01756 797 766 or email servicepoint@cpoms.co.uk and the team will be happy to help you out.
