Safeguarding Round-Up- Current Updates
September has already brought a number of important safeguarding developments, new resources and emerging evidence for professionals working across education, health, social care and the wider safeguarding landscape.
This week’s round-up looks at new KCSIE knowledge and online safety audit tools from LGfL, important language guidance from the NSPCC, new ONS data about children’s experiences of online and community harm, growing concern about children presenting to emergency departments in mental health crisis, and proposed legislation targeting child-like sexual abuse dolls.
As always, the important question is not simply “What has changed?”, but “What might this mean for our safeguarding practice?”
KCSIE 2026: are staff reading it, or understanding it?
London Grid for Learning (LGfL) has released its updated KCSIE 2026 Staff Knowledge Quizzes, designed to help organisations explore whether staff have not only read Keeping Children Safe in Education, but actually understood it.
The free resources include quizzes covering:
KCSIE Part One
Prevent
Child-on-child sexual violence and harassment
Online safeguarding
Concerns about colleagues
Types and indicators of harm
Management of safeguarding
LGfL has also used responses from thousands of staff completing previous quizzes to identify areas where gaps in safeguarding knowledge remain.
This is particularly useful because safeguarding training should never become a once-a-year information exercise.
Asking someone whether they have completed training or read KCSIE provides evidence of activity. It doesn't necessarily tell us whether they can recognise a concern, understand what action to take or confidently apply that knowledge in practice.
Safeguarding reflection
Rather than simply recording quiz completion or scores, DSLs could use the results to ask:
Where are our knowledge gaps?
Are particular questions repeatedly being answered incorrectly?
Do different staff groups have different learning needs?
What does this tell us about our safeguarding training plan for the rest of the year?
Used well, these quizzes could become part of an organisation's wider training needs analysis and safeguarding assurance, rather than another compliance task.
Explore the LGfL KCSIE Staff Knowledge Quizzes
Online safety: when did you last audit your arrangements?
LGfL has also updated its Online Safety Audit for 2026.
Keeping Children Safe in Education states that schools and colleges should consider carrying out an annual review of their approach to online safety, led by the DSL. LGfL's audit is specifically referenced within KCSIE as a resource that can support this work.
The audit uses a RAG-rating approach and helps organisations consider evidence and actions across two broad areas:
curriculum, wider approach and communication
safe school systems, including technology used for safeguarding
The 2026 version includes a new section focusing on roles and responsibilities, recognising that although the DSL has lead responsibility for online safety, effective safeguarding requires multiple roles across the organisation to work together.
There is also increased consideration of:
generative AI
wearable technology
data protection
filtering and monitoring arrangements.
LGfL recommends that organisations integrate the audit with wider safeguarding assurance, including Section 175 or local authority audits and annual filtering and monitoring reviews, and that findings are shared with governors or trustees.
Safeguarding reflection
Online safety auditing should be much more than checking whether filtering software exists.
A stronger assurance question is:
Do our people, policies, curriculum, systems and technology work together effectively to identify and reduce online safeguarding risk – and what evidence tells us this?
That requires conversations between safeguarding, IT, curriculum leads, senior leaders and governance.
Access the LGfL Online Safety Audit
Why language matters: “non-recent” rather than “historic” abuse
The NSPCC has published an important piece examining why professionals should consider using the term “non-recent abuse” rather than “historic abuse”.
Language matters in safeguarding. The NSPCC explains that describing abuse as “historic” can inadvertently position someone's experience firmly in the past and risk suggesting that its impact has also passed.
For many victims and survivors, the effects of childhood abuse remain significant throughout adulthood and may continue to affect wellbeing, relationships and feelings of safety. Using the term non-recent abuse can provide a more trauma-informed way of describing abuse that occurred previously while recognising its continuing impact.
The NSPCC also highlights why adults may not disclose childhood abuse until many years later. Reasons can include shame, fear of not being believed, not understanding at the time that what happened was abuse, fear of reprisals or having been silenced by the person causing harm or others around them.
Importantly, a non-recent disclosure may also identify a person who continues to pose a safeguarding risk to children or adults today.
Safeguarding reflection
This is a useful prompt for organisations to review the language used within:
safeguarding policies
referral forms
case management systems
training
supervision
incident recording
conversations with victims and survivors.
Trauma-informed safeguarding isn't only about the decisions we make.
It is also about the language we use while making them, and, importantly, we should remain sensitive to the terminology individual victims and survivors choose to use to describe their own experiences.
What are children telling us about crime and online safety?
New data from the Office for National Statistics, released on 2 September 2026, provides a significant insight into the experiences and perceptions of children aged 10–15 in England and Wales.
The findings from the redesigned Children's Crime Survey for England and Wales highlight just how embedded online activity is within children's everyday lives.
Among children aged 10–15:
84% spent three or more hours online per day at weekends.
25% spent seven hours or more online per day at weekends.
66% spent three or more hours online on an ordinary weekday.
There are also important findings around exposure to harmful material.
Among children aged 13–15:
48% reported seeing a lot or a fair amount of hateful content targeted at particular characteristics
19% had seen a lot or a fair amount of content encouraging eating disorders
15% had seen a lot or a fair amount of sexual images or videos
12% had seen a lot or a fair amount of content showing or encouraging self-harm.
Much of that exposure was not actively sought out. For example, 88% of those exposed to hateful content reported encountering at least some of it unintentionally.
The findings on sexual messaging are equally important.
12% of 13–15-year-olds had received at least one sexual message during the previous 12 months.
Among those receiving sexual messages:
25% had received more than ten
19% had received sexual messages from an adult aged 18 or over
68% considered the messages unwanted
girls were considerably more likely than boys to say messages were unwanted
just over half of those receiving unwanted sexual messages told someone.
The survey also provides a wider picture of children's experiences of violence.
Around 69% of children aged 10–15 had seen or heard about a fight or another form of physical violence between peers during the previous 12 months, while 25% thought it very or quite likely that people carried weapons in their local area.
Safeguarding reflection
There is a danger that we continue to separate children's “online” and “offline” worlds when their experiences increasingly move between the two.
Violence, exploitation, misogyny, harmful sexual behaviour, bullying, self-harm, eating-disorder content and criminal influence can all move across peer groups, communities, platforms and physical environments.
This reinforces the importance of contextual safeguarding and professional curiosity.
When something happens online, we should be asking:
What else might be happening around this child?
And when concerns emerge offline:
What role might their online world be playing?
The data also gives organisations something else important: the voice and lived experience of children themselves. This should inform safeguarding risk assessments, curriculum planning, staff training and conversations with young people.
Read the full ONS report: Children's perceptions of crime and online safety in England and Wales
Children in crisis: growing mental health pressures in emergency departments
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has published new analysis examining children and young people's mental-health-related attendance at emergency departments in England between 2019 and 2025.
Its findings point towards increasing numbers of children presenting in mental health crisis and significant increases in those experiencing lengthy waits in emergency departments.
A particularly concerning feature is that children presenting in crisis are becoming younger, while the needs of those attending are increasingly complex.
The RCPCH highlights that some children don't require hospital admission but cannot be safely discharged. Community support might not immediately be available, families may need additional support, or appropriate placements can be difficult to secure.
This can leave children remaining in emergency departments while professionals try to identify alternative arrangements.
Those experiencing some of the longest waits are described as often being among the most vulnerable children, with needs spanning mental health, education, social care and neurodevelopmental services.
Safeguarding reflection
Mental health and safeguarding cannot be considered entirely separately.
Behind a child presenting in crisis there may be a combination of factors including:
abuse or neglect
exploitation
family difficulties
trauma
school or educational pressures
bullying
online experiences
neurodivergence
poverty and wider contextual factors.
No single service may hold the complete picture.
This is why information sharing, multi-agency working and professional curiosity remain so important.
We should also continue to ask whether our systems are intervening sufficiently early – or whether children are increasingly having to reach crisis point before they can access meaningful support.
Read the RCPCH report: Children in crisis – mental health pressures in emergency departments
Government backs new law banning child-like sexual abuse dolls
The Government announced on 4 September 2026 that it is backing legislation creating specific offences relating to child-like sexual abuse dolls.
The Child-like Sexual Abuse Dolls (Offences) Private Members' Bill is intended to make the manufacture, possession, purchase and sale of these items illegal, with offences carrying potential prison sentences of up to five years.
The Home Office states that police have encountered these products during investigations involving suspected child sexual abuse offenders and when monitoring registered sex offenders, but current legislation does not provide a specific offence covering their manufacture or possession.
The NSPCC has supported closing this legislative gap and has highlighted that there is no comprehensive evidence that using such items prevents contact offending against children.
The proposal forms part of wider government activity aimed at tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation.
Safeguarding reflection
Although this may initially appear to be predominantly a criminal justice issue, there are broader safeguarding implications.
Organisations should continue to ensure that staff understand:
how concerns about an adult's sexual interest in children should be escalated
the difference between safeguarding concerns, allegations and low-level concerns
when information may need to be shared with statutory agencies
how concerns about adults working with children are recorded and managed
the importance of looking at patterns of behaviour rather than individual incidents in isolation.
Safeguarding systems must create space for professionals to report behaviour that feels concerning, even where they aren't yet able to establish exactly what that behaviour means.
Read the Government announcement: New law to ban child-like sexual abuse dolls
What should safeguarding leaders take from this month's updates?
Although these developments cover very different areas of safeguarding, there are some consistent themes.
Test understanding, not attendance.
Staff completing training or reading guidance is only one piece of assurance. We need to understand whether safeguarding knowledge translates into confident practice.
Audit effectiveness, not paperwork.
Whether reviewing online safety or wider safeguarding arrangements, the question should be whether systems are working – and what evidence demonstrates this.
Listen to what children are telling us.
The latest ONS data reinforces the scale and complexity of children's experiences of online harm, sexual messaging and violence.
Think contextually.
Online and offline harm cannot be neatly separated. Neither can safeguarding, mental health, exploitation, education and wider family circumstances.
Be thoughtful about language.
The move from “historic” towards “non-recent” abuse is a useful reminder that language shapes how people experience our safeguarding systems.
Remain professionally curious.
A piece of information may seem small in isolation. The safeguarding significance often becomes apparent when we understand what else is happening around the person.
At RLB Safeguarding, we continue to encourage organisations to move beyond compliance, using audit, training, supervision and safeguarding assurance to understand not simply whether arrangements exist, but whether they are genuinely making people safer.
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