Operation Glanmere
A complete safeguarding investigation case for secondary classrooms. Your students learn to recognise the warning signs of child criminal exploitation: how grooming begins, how indicators appear separately but tell one story together, and how trusted adults respond when a young person is at risk.
Unlock Operation Glanmere
A complete investigation case for secondary classrooms, free of charge. Enter your details to access the full pack.
The skills built into the case
Recognise the warning signs
How indicators of child criminal exploitation appear in the real world: changes in behaviour, possessions that don't add up, secrecy around phones, association with older outsiders, travel away from home.
Understand how grooming works
Why a victim of exploitation rarely looks like one. Why the right response is protection, not blame. The four phases of grooming, made visible across the case file.
Read evidence carefully
How no single document tells the full story. How separate pieces of evidence form a clear pattern when read together. How to weigh credibility, integrate sources, and resist jumping to conclusions.
Write a professional response
Students produce a structured assessment in the voice of an officer: naming the issue, citing the evidence, recommending a multi-agency safeguarding response. Calm, factual, defensible.
What students will investigate
Operation Glanmere is set in the fictional coastal town of Anchors Bay. A youth worker has raised a safeguarding concern about Liam Carter, age 14. As the case file builds, evidence accumulates that Liam is being recruited and exploited by an adult network operating in a neighbouring town.
The case unfolds across 11 evidence documents (police, school, intelligence, and community sources), then resolves across 4 follow-up documents that show what real safeguarding outcomes look like. Students take the role of an officer reviewing the file, identifying the pattern, and writing a clear professional assessment recommending what should happen next.
The complete pack
Everything you need to run Operation Glanmere with your class, included free of charge.
- Police briefing memo and Stage 3 task sheet
- 11 evidence documents across police, school, and council sources
- 4 resolution documents revealing the safeguarding outcome
- Teacher instructions with safeguarding setup and disclosure protocol
- Teacher glossary covering all the terminology in the case
- Teacher answer key with model response and marking checklist
Designed for secondary classrooms
Operation Glanmere works across personal development, citizenship, and safeguarding lessons. Designed for ages 13 and over, the case requires appropriate teacher facilitation. Full safeguarding setup guidance is included in the teacher pack, including suggested framing language to read aloud, protocol if a student discloses, and aftercare for any student visibly affected by the content.
The case has been written to work in any country. The setting is a fictional UK coastal town, but the institutional language has been kept neutral so the case can be delivered in classrooms in the UK, Australia, the US, and beyond without modification.