Top safeguarding tips for 2025/26

We hear from education lawyer and safeguarding expert Dai Durbridge to gain advice on the safeguarding challenges facing schools and trusts this academic year. 

There are plenty more to mention, but these are my top issues for schools and trusts to focus on this academic year. 

Effective record keeping

This is fundamental to good safeguarding practice but often done poorly. Detailed records provide an accurate account of safeguarding concerns, incidents or disclosures and helps prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications about what happened.

Records should contain clear facts, full sentences and avoid using initials. This latter point is crucial; the use of initials has no data protection benefit but can significantly reduce clarity of recording and in turn, increases risk.

Staff training and development

Think topics, think training calendar, think varied training methods. For me, you can’t beat reflective learning and any session you lead that begins with the sentence “this happened here” is extremely impactful.

You can have too much of a good thing though, so don’t rely only on this method; mix and match with face-to-face sessions, workshops, FAQs, quizzes, quick videos and more. Engage with staff: find out how they like to learn. 

Gaming and online safety

Does your online safety plan include gaming? Whilst online gaming can be great for cognitive and problem-solving skills and for social interaction, like anything online, it comes with risks.

Exposure to inappropriate content such as violence, gambling features, sexual content and extremist ideologies can occur. Unmoderated chat risks include bullying, harassment and online grooming and then there’s a risk of unfiltered user-generated content such as mods, custom skins and in-game chat introducing harmful material. Should gaming be in your plan?

Coaching safeguarding leads

DSL coaching is an emerging and highly valuable approach that complements, but is distinct from, supervision. Supervision tends to focus on case management, risk and emotional support, whilst coaching is about professional growth, leadership development and strategic effectiveness in the safeguarding role. If supervision is about safeguarding the work, coaching is about safeguarding the worker as a leader.

Safeguarding is leadership, not just compliance, and coaching helps DSLs step into that leadership space more confidently. It can be an asset to all DSLs, but particularly for recently appointed DSLs, DSLs stepping into strategic roles in trusts and those managing complex teams or cases. 

Safeguarding support for trusts

We’ve updated our popular Trust directors of safeguarding CPD programme for this academic year and (at the time of writing) there are still a few places available. The course consists of 20 hours of bite-size learning over four months, designed specifically for directors of safeguarding:

• Understand how to develop your structure to enhance safeguarding.
• Trust-wide approach to quality assurance.
• Developing your safeguarding strategy.

Find out more