_{North East Scotland College}

The challenge

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Before partnering with Culture Shift in 2021, North East Scotland College was managing safeguarding the way many institutions still do: manually, reactively, and with limited visibility across sites.

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The college operates across five campuses, including Aberdeen City, Aberdeen Altens, Fraserburgh, Ellon, and the Scottish Maritime Academy. Each campus serves a distinct student community, and the safeguarding team responsible for all of them was small. Coordinating incident management across that geography, with a spreadsheet as the primary tool, meant the team was always working with incomplete information.

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There was no reliable way to identify patterns in the data. No mechanism to spot whether an issue in one campus was also showing up in another. And no infrastructure to turn what they were seeing on the ground into meaningful, targeted action. The team was doing important work under real constraints, but the tools available to them weren't keeping pace with what the role demanded.

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Finding the right platform

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NESCol needed more than a digital reporting form. They needed a platform that could centralise incident data, give their team a clear picture of what was happening across the institution, and support the kind of proactive, education-led approach to culture change they wanted to build.

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Report + Support™ offered exactly that. Purpose-built for organisations that take misconduct seriously, the platform combines anonymous and named reporting with a case management system and analytics dashboard that surfaces trends in real time. For a small team managing a large and geographically spread institution, that combination was the deciding factor.

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The implementation

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NESCol went live with Report + Support™ in February 2021. Within the first week, reports were already coming in.

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Rolling out a new platform across five campuses, each with its own staff and student community, takes time and deliberate communication. The NESCol team invested heavily in awareness from the start, running campaigns to let students and staff know the platform existed, what it was for, and how to use it. A gender-based violence awareness course was made available to both staff and students as part of the wider launch effort.

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Policies across the college were updated to reflect the new procedures, and the team continued to iterate their campaigns in response to topical issues as they arose. The rollout was not instantaneous, but it was thorough, and the groundwork laid in those early months shaped how effectively the platform has been used since.

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The outcome

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The analytics dashboard has given the safeguarding team something they didn’t have before: a real-time, institution-wide view of reporting trends. Where previously a pattern might go unnoticed across campuses, it can now be identified quickly and acted on with precision.

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When reports of a racist nature began to appear regularly, the team used that data to direct targeted messaging through their Respect campaign, through the academic and personal skills development unit that all students are enrolled on, and through the college's acceptable behaviour policy. The data didn't just flag that a problem existed. It gave the team what they needed to respond to it in a focused, structured way.

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The platform also proved its value during moments of national significance. When the Sarah Everard case dominated the news, NESCol saw a direct spike in reports from students, both named and anonymous. The team was able to update the support content on the platform quickly, ensuring students had access to relevant resources while case managers dealt with the reports directly.

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Beyond incident response, the data has changed how NESCol approaches learning and development. Anonymised case studies drawn from historical reports are now used in CPD sessions for curriculum managers and heads of sector, making training more grounded and more meaningful than any generic scenario could be. And each year, the themes that emerge from reporting trends feed directly into the three focus areas of NESCol's annual Respect campaign.

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Looking ahead

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NESCol's ambition with the platform is ongoing. The team is focused on developing the support side of the platform further, keeping content current as new topics emerge, and continuing to build on a foundation that now sits at the centre of how the college understands and responds to its community.

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Their approach is a model for what evidence-led safeguarding looks like in practice: not waiting for problems to escalate, but using data to get ahead of them.

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See how Report + Support™ works.