About GIRFEC

GIRFEC is the national approach in Scotland to improving outcomes and supporting the wellbeing of children and young people by offering the right help at the right time for the right people. 3sysACADEMIC helps Scottish schools fulfil their GIRFEC responsibilities by incorporating the required forms into the Pastoral Management module and ensuring records can be kept accurately while making a suitable document trail available.

3sysACADEMIC allows users in Scottish schools to:

• Configure access to GIRFEC forms and information.
• Associate appropriate pastoral management categories with specific GIRFEC forms.
• Complete GIRFEC forms when adding new pastoral records and notes.
• Complete GIRFEC forms after the initial record has been created, if required.
• Update forms at a later date based upon a copy of the latest version, meaning every change creates a new record and previously captured information remains intact.
• Download a report summarising child protection concerns.

GIRFEC forms MUST be completed PER PUPIL (rather than per record), and in accordance with Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS) guidance. Some fields are completed automatically based on data already added to the system. A warning message appears if there are errors, such as missing or incomplete data, giving the user an opportunity to make corrections.

About Configuring GIRFEC

You complete the GIRFEC information as part of adding and maintaining pastoral records. However, GIRFEC functionality needs to be activated on the system and access to the Pastoral Management module and Child Protection Concern report allocated to relevant users by your System Administrator.

For more information, System Administrators should see the 3sysACADEMIC Pastoral Management Setup Guide, available from the Customer Centre.

GIRFEC options are associated with categories. When a category is created by your System Administrator, he / she can indicate which GIRFEC forms, if any, can be completed for this type of pastoral record. This means that GIRFEC options appear whenever a user selects a relevant category, e.g. when adding a record via the Add a Pastoral Record screen or adding a note via the Edit a Pastoral Record screen.

In the following examples, GIRFEC forms are associated with the 'Critical' category, so have appeared when 'Critical' is selected from the Category drop list.

For more information, see:

• About Adding Pastoral Records.
• About Maintaining Pastoral Records.
• About Maintaining GIRFEC Forms.
• About Pastoral Record Reporting and Auditing.