If you’re responsible for safeguarding in a school, nursery or care setting, you’ll know the rules keep changing. Guidance is updated annually by the Department for Education (DfE), and it changes what your staff needs to know and do to stay compliant.
This isn’t just an issue for schools, either. Clubs, charities, local authorities and sports providers all need to know what’s expected of their staff.
Here’s what’s changed, what good safeguarding children training for staff looks like, and how to put it into practice.
What does KCSIE guidance mean for schools and care settings?
Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance is updated annually, and the changes have real implications for how you train and support your staff.
Recently, key updates have included:
- Online safety risks now explicitly include misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories, alongside the existing categories like content, contact, conduct and commerce risks
- A new DfE self-assessment tool to help you check you’re meeting filtering and monitoring standards
- Clearer expectations around alternative provision, including written confirmation that safer recruitment checks have been carried out by any provider you place a child with
- Updated terminology, including the shift from “autism spectrum disorder” to “autism”, in line with current SEND guidance
KCSIE is written for schools, but it is widely used as a benchmark for good safeguarding practice. Many businesses and charities outside education now use it to shape their own policies and training.
This matters because safeguarding concerns aren’t going away. The National Governance Association’s 2025 Annual Governance Survey found that almost half of governors and trustees had seen safeguarding concerns increase over the past year. Bullying, online harms, neglect and domestic abuse all featured heavily.
Recognising signs a child may need support
This is the bit that actually protects children, and it’s where most organisations fall short. Knowing the policy is one thing. Spotting the signs in real life is another.
A 2025 NSPCC survey found that 17% of UK adults couldn’t correctly identify common examples of emotional abuse. That included behaviours like being overly controlling of a child’s life or pushing a child far beyond their limits. Two thirds of those surveyed had done no training or reading at all to help them recognise the signs.
That’s a significant gap, especially if your staff are the ones most likely to notice something’s wrong.
Signs to watch for include:
- Sudden changes in behaviour – such as becoming withdrawn, aggressive, or unusually clingy.
- Unexplained injuries or a pattern of minor injuries with inconsistent explanations.
- Fear of a particular person or reluctance to go home.
- Regression – for example, a previously confident child becoming anxious or losing skills they’d already learnt.
- Inappropriate knowledge or language for their age.
It’s important to be clear that no single sign confirms abuse. But a pattern, or a gut feeling that something’s off, is always worth raising. Staff shouldn’t need to be certain before they say something. They just need to know who to tell and how.
Make sure every member of staff – not just your designated safeguarding lead – knows:
- Who the designated safeguarding lead (or equivalent) is, and how to contact them quickly.
- That they should never investigate concerns themselves.
- That a verbal report should be followed up in writing, with dates and exact words used wherever possible.
- That delaying a report, even by a day, can make a real difference to a child’s safety.
💡 Want to make sure your team is fully covered on safeguarding? Our Safeguarding Children Certification gives every member of staff a clear, practical grounding in spotting abuse, reporting it correctly, and understanding latest KCSIE responsibilities – and you can try it free for 14 days.
What your staff needs to know
Recent guidance now explicitly names misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories as online safety risks. These sit alongside more familiar concerns like harmful content, online contact with strangers, and risky conduct such as sharing personal information.
For any organisation working with children, this means:
- Staff need to understand current online risks, not just the ones from a few years ago. Generative AI, deepfakes and algorithm-driven misinformation are now firmly part of the safeguarding conversation.
- Filtering and monitoring systems should be reviewed regularly, not set up once and forgotten.
- Staff training should be refreshed, not completed once at induction and never revisited.
If your organisation isn’t a school, you won’t be held to KCSIE’s filtering and monitoring standards directly. But the principle behind it applies just as much to a youth club as it does to a classroom. Staff should understand digital risks to children and know how to respond.
Building safeguarding into your wider training culture
Safeguarding training works best when it isn’t a one-off tick-box exercise. A few practical steps make a real difference:
- Assign role-specific training, so each member of staff receives the level of detail appropriate to their role.
- Set automatic refresher reminders, rather than relying on manual reminders.
- Make sure new starters complete training during induction, not weeks into the role.
- Review your policy annually, even in years when KCSIE itself doesn’t change much.
None of this needs to be complicated – it just needs to be consistent.
A clear next step
Safeguarding training is about making sure every member of your team would know exactly what to do if they were worried about a child, today.
Ask yourself: if a new starter joined tomorrow, would they know exactly who to go to and what their responsibilities are? If the answer’s not an immediate yes, that’s worth fixing first.
Ready to train your team?
Staff Skills academy+ gives your team access to 750+ CPD-certified courses – including Safeguarding Children Certification. Start a free 14-day trial today, or speak to our team about what works for your organisation.
