Safeguarding Round-Up: Key Updates, Research and Developments – August 2026
Safeguarding continues to evolve rapidly across children’s social care, online safety, mental health, children’s rights and early intervention.
This month’s round-up brings together some of the latest research, regulatory data and policy developments and considers what they mean for organisations responsible for protecting and supporting children and young people.
1. Ofsted data highlights pressures across children’s homes and supported accommodation
Ofsted has published its latest regulatory activity data covering children’s homes and supported accommodation in England between April 2025 and March 2026. At the end of March 2026, there were approximately 4,800 children’s homes and 1,220 supported accommodation providers active or suspended in England.
During the year, Ofsted investigated 3,440 cases involving children’s homes, including 610 recorded child protection concerns. A further 830 cases involving supported accommodation providers were investigated, including 210 child protection concerns.
Leadership remains an area to watch. As of March 2026, 20% of children’s homes did not have a registered manager in post, while 12% of supported accommodation providers did not have a registered service manager.
Ofsted also opened 850 cases concerning potentially unregistered provision. Of these, 84% had been assessed as settings that should have been registered at the point the data was extracted.
For safeguarding leaders, the figures reinforce the importance of strong governance, stable leadership, effective oversight and robust escalation arrangements. Compliance with registration requirements is important but safe care ultimately depends on the quality of practice taking place every day.
Safeguarding question:
Do leaders and boards have sufficient oversight of safeguarding culture, workforce stability, incidents, concerns and patterns or is assurance overly dependent on inspection outcomes?
Read more here
2. New research reveals changing pathways into and through the care system
New research from the Centre for Care examines Department for Education data on children entering and leaving care in England between 2021 and 2025.
One of the most significant developments is the changing age profile of children entering care.
More than half are now aged 10 or older, while the proportion of entrants aged 16 and over increased from 20% in 2021 to 28% in 2025.
The types of placements children experience are changing too. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of children living in residential, supported or semi-independent provision increased from 11,360 to 17,000, around a 50% rise.
There are also striking geographical differences. In 2025, local authority rates of children in care ranged from 27 to 184 per 10,000 children, representing approximately a seven-fold variation.
These figures raise important questions about adolescent safeguarding, contextual risk, placement sufficiency and the support provided to older teenagers entering care.
Older adolescents entering care may already have experienced significant trauma, exploitation, family breakdown or instability. Their safeguarding needs cannot be understood simply through placement arrangements context, relationships and transition into adulthood all matter.
Safeguarding question:
Are our systems designed around the needs of the children we actually see today particularly older adolescents or around assumptions about what a looked-after child traditionally looks like?
3. Looking beyond behaviour: mentalising and emotion regulation
A recent Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health article explores mentalising and emotion regulation within children and families.
Mentalising involves trying to understand our own and other people’s behaviour in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, intentions and emotions, while recognising that we may not always know exactly what another person is experiencing.
The implications extend beyond clinical practice.
For professionals working with children, challenging, withdrawn or distressed behaviour can sometimes become the focus of intervention. A more trauma-informed and curious approach asks:
What might be happening underneath this behaviour?
The research highlights the importance of understanding children within their relationships and wider contexts, rather than reducing behaviour to a fixed explanation. It also recognises that emotional regulation often develops through relationships with parents, carers, teachers and other trusted adults.
This aligns closely with good safeguarding practice.
Professional curiosity does not mean making assumptions. It means noticing behaviour, wondering what may sit beneath it, considering context and asking appropriate questions.
Safeguarding question:
When a child’s behaviour changes, are we simply responding to the behaviour — or considering what that behaviour may be communicating?
4. Sharp rise in children reporting fake or manipulated sexual imagery
New figures from the Internet Watch Foundation highlight an alarming development in online sexual harm.
During the whole of 2025, the IWF received 397 reports from children involving imagery they believed had been faked or manipulated.
In just the first six months of 2026, that figure had already risen to 420 reports.
Importantly, where analysts confirmed that imagery met the legal threshold for child sexual abuse material, there were already 268 reports involving suspected fake imagery by June 2026, compared with 221 across the whole of 2025.
AI-generated and digitally manipulated sexual imagery fundamentally changes the landscape of online safeguarding.
A child does not have to have taken or shared an intimate image for sexual imagery depicting them to exist.
Everyday photographs can potentially be manipulated. The resulting harm can include humiliation, bullying, coercion, sexual extortion and fear about where images may circulate.
Safeguarding education therefore needs to move beyond traditional messages such as “don’t send nudes”.
Children need to understand that they are not responsible for someone using technology to abuse them, and professionals need to know how to respond when manipulated imagery is reported.
Under-18s can also use Childline and the IWF’s Report Remove service to report nude or sexual imagery of themselves online.
Safeguarding question:
Does our online safety training reflect the realities of AI-generated sexual imagery, deepfakes and sexual extortion or are we still teaching yesterday’s risks?
Read more here
5. Wales: assessing the first 100 days for children and young people
Children in Wales has published a briefing examining the Welsh Government’s first 100 days and progress against commitments affecting babies, children and young people.
It highlights developments across child poverty, childcare, education, preventative health and children’s rights.
Among the areas identified are the development of a new Child Poverty Strategy, plans for a Welsh Child Payment scheme, expansion of funded childcare, free school meals and a commitment to further incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Welsh law.
Children in Wales welcomes the early focus while also calling for clear targets and accountability so that commitments translate into meaningful change.
For safeguarding organisations, this distinction is important.
Strong strategies and commitments matter but safeguarding assurance asks a further question:
What difference is this making to children’s lived experience?
The same principle applies within individual organisations. Policies, strategies and action plans are only meaningful when they translate into safer experiences and better outcomes.
6. More than 70 organisations call for children’s rights to be placed at the heart of Government
More than 70 organisations have written to the Prime Minister calling for stronger protection of children’s rights across government decision-making.
The coalition, led by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, includes organisations such as UNICEF UK, the National Children’s Bureau and Save the Children UK.
A key request is for Child Rights Impact Assessments to become a statutory requirement, following recommendations arising from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
The organisations are also calling for a clear roadmap towards full incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into UK law.
This is about more than legislation.
A rights-based safeguarding approach asks organisations to actively consider children's voices, experiences and best interests when designing policies, services and decisions that affect them.
Participation should not be tokenistic or reserved for occasional consultation exercises.
Children and young people are experts in their own experiences.
Safeguarding question:
How routinely do we consider the impact of organisational decisions on children and how often do children themselves have a meaningful opportunity to influence those decisions?
7. Making Young Futures Hubs work for girls and young women
The Centre for Young Lives and Agenda Alliance have published a new briefing exploring how Young Futures Hubs can better meet the needs of girls and young women.
A particularly important message is that girls' experiences of violence, exploitation, mental ill-health and exclusion can differ from those typically associated with boys meaning they can be overlooked by services designed around more visible patterns of offending or risk.
The briefing calls for Young Futures Hubs to provide a trusted point of access connecting education, health, youth justice and community services, while maintaining strong relationships with specialist sexual violence and Violence Against Women and Girls services.
It also emphasises proactive outreach, co-production, trauma-informed support and gender-informed practice.
Three themes stand out:
Prevent harm. Respond effectively to harm. Create safe spaces.
There is a broader safeguarding lesson here.
Equality does not always mean offering everybody exactly the same response.
Good safeguarding means recognising how vulnerability, exploitation and harm may present differently depending on someone's circumstances and adapting services accordingly.
Safeguarding question:
Who might our safeguarding systems be unintentionally designed not to see?
What connects these developments?
On the surface, these updates cover very different issues.
Children’s homes.
Care pathways.
Mental health.
Artificial intelligence.
Children’s rights.
Government policy.
Violence against women and girls.
But there is a common thread running through all of them.
Effective safeguarding requires us to understand the person, their context and the changing environment around them.
It means looking beyond presenting behaviour, recognising emerging forms of harm, understanding that vulnerability changes over time, listening to children's voices, identifying people who may be less visible within traditional safeguarding systems and ensuring that governance and compliance translate into meaningful practice.
Perhaps the challenge for safeguarding leaders this month is therefore not simply:
“Have we read the latest guidance?”
But:
“What has changed and what might we now need to do differently?”
At RLB, we support organisations to move beyond compliance through safeguarding consultancy, auditing, training, supervision and strategic safeguarding support helping leaders turn emerging learning into safer practice.
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