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Participating

The Future of Church Safeguarding Programme (Programme) has sought the views of a wide range of people on how to make safeguarding for the Church of England fully independent.
There have been two ways for people to share their views, either through an in-person interview or an online survey.

Diocesan visits for in-person interviews

By the end of autumn 2023, Professor Jay and the Programme team will have visited 6 dioceses across England.

The in-person interviews with Professor Jay and her team have been held in:

  • Exeter
  • Newcastle
  • Coventry
  • London
  • Portsmouth
  • Carlisle

 

Anyone who wished to participate in the interviews has been able to register their interest on this page from 15th August 2023 to 26th October 2023.

The interviews have now been completed in every area except one. In the remaining area, the interview schedule is now fully booked. As a result, we are closing the ‘register your interest’ option on our website for these visits.

To ensure that everybody has the opportunity to share their views with the Programme, we are keeping our survey open until Friday 17th November 2023.

Survey

The Programme is running an online survey to ensure that everybody who wishes to share their views has an opportunity to do so.

This is open to anyone who meets the participation criteria, being (i) you have experiences of recent (within 5 years) safeguarding in the Church of England; and (ii) that you are over 18 years of age.

This could include

  • Victims and survivors of abuse, or their parents/carers;
  • Members of the clergy;
  • Church staff and volunteers;
  • Members of congregations; and,
  • Members of the public

 

Professor Jay will use the results of the survey to inform her recommendations to the Archbishops’ Council and publish them in her report by the end of December 2023.

The survey will remain open until Friday 17th November 2023.

For further information, and to complete the survey, please follow this link.

Take part in the survey

Your welfare and well-being while participating in the Future of Church Safeguarding Programme (the Programme) is really important to us. 

You are welcome to tell us as little or as much as you like during your engagement with the Programme. Any information you share with us will remain confidential and will be anonymised before being used in our final report – this means there is no risk of you, or anyone else, being identified. 

We are unable to support you with safeguarding issues you may have already raised, or wish to raise, about an individual, or individuals, within the Church of England. These issues remain subject to Church of England safeguarding processes. 

However, we have our own process for safeguarding the welfare of participants during our work, including how we respond to information you share with us that leads us to believe that:

  • you or someone else has been harmed
  • is at risk of harm
  • you or someone else has harmed someone else, or is at risk of  harming someone else


This process is not linked to the Church of England. 

We will speak with you if we need to take action and pass information to organisations that can take protective action, like the police or social care. However in some cases, we will have to break our confidentiality with you to pass information without your consent where we have a legal obligation to do so. 

To find out in more detail what we mean by safeguarding and how we will respond during our work, please click here.