Daily Safeguarding News - Safer Schools

A former police officer has been jailed for life over 160 child sexual offences

Lewis Edwards, a former police officer for South Wales police has been sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 12 years.
This follows him admitting to over 160 offences of child sexual abuse (CSA).
Some of his victims were as young as 10–years–old.
Edwards posed as a teenage boy to target young girls between 10 and 16 years-old, grooming them into sharing indecent images of themselves.
Snapchat was the platform he used to contact his victims.
He would blackmail and threaten his victims despite their pleas for him to stop, resulting in his victims complying with his demands out of fear.
For more, please visit the CPS website.

The chief executive of Ofcom Dame Melanie Dawes has stated that the Online Safety Bill could receive royal assent and become law as soon today.
The new internet safety laws for the UK will place new duties on social media platforms to protect users from harmful content, with Ofcom as regulator.
Dame Dawes gave evidence to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee yesterday, saying she hoped Ofcom’s remit would “start tomorrow (Thursday) when the Bill, we hope, will receive royal assent.”
Ofcom is expected to set out how it will begin to use its powers in the coming weeks.
For more, please visit the Independent’s website.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said images of a well-known female singer reimagined as a child are being shared by predators.
In May, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman and US Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, issued a joint statement committing to tackle the “alarming rise in despicable AI-generated images of children being sexually exploited by paedophiles”.
The IWF report documented that in one folder, 501 images were uncovered, of a real-world victim, aged approximately 9-10 years old when she was subjected to sexual abuse. Predators shared a fine-tuned AI model file to allow others to generate more images of her.
In one month the IWF investigated 11,108 AI images shared on a dark web child abuse forum, and of these, 2,978 depicted child sexual abuse. 564 were classified as Category A, the most serious imagery.
The report reiterates the harm of AI images, through normalising predatory behaviour and the wasting of police resources as they investigate children that do not exist.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.

Colleges in England say they are having to expand class sizes and hire exam halls to cope with the increased number of pupils taking compulsory GCSE resits.
According to the Association of Colleges (AoC), an extra 60,000 students prepare to resit English and maths.
Changes to grading this year meant that GCSE passes in England, Wales and NI fell this year with 68.2% of all entries marked at grades 4/C and above.
Additionally, the pass rates for resits is low – 16.4% of people aged 17 and over taking their maths GCSE resit passed, compared with 25.9% of those taking English.
The government has announced a further £150 million per year over the next two years to help colleges with students taking resits and laid out plans for the Advanced British Standard – a new qualification that would include some England and maths to 18.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.

A BBC investigation has found that children in care in Surrey and Sussex are being housed in illegal homes amid a severe shortage of placements.
From March 2022 to 2023, 49 children under the age of 16 were placed into housing which was not approved by Ofsted and banned by the government in 2021.
Freedom of information requests (FOIs) also revealed councils used unregulated accommodation on 81 occasions.
Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive of Become, a charity for children in care reported that the accommodation was not appropriate for children, particularly those who have experienced significant trauma.
The Department for Education (DfE), which has overall responsibility for looked after children in England, stated it was “investing more than £259m over the next three years to increase the places available locally”.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.