Early childhood safeguarding changes 2026: Moving beyond compliance to a culture of safety

Safeguarding cannot simply be a tick-box exercise 

Safeguarding has always been fundamental to working with children. Yet the increasing scrutiny around safeguarding in early childhood is forcing us to ask a more difficult question: are our systems genuinely designed to prevent harm, or do we still too often improve them only after something has gone wrong? 

We come to this discussion from different professional perspectives. One of us has spent many years operating within the early childhood profession and working with compliance systems; the other has worked for more than 30 years in social work and safeguarding, including frontline child protection, local authority work, the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) role and independent safeguarding investigations. Despite those different starting points, we arrive at much the same conclusion: good safeguarding cannot be reduced to compliance. 

Policies, procedures and statutory guidance matter enormously, but having a safeguarding policy does not automatically create a safeguarding culture. A setting can have every document it is expected to have and still create an environment in which an educator feels uncomfortable speaking up, a parent believes their concern has not been heard, or small pieces of information remain disconnected from one another. 

The question therefore needs to move from ‘Do we have the policy?’ to ‘What actually happens here when somebody is worried?’ 

Making sense of KCSIE, the EYFS and safeguarding guidance

One of the challenges for the early childhood community is the sheer volume of guidance. There is the Early years foundation stage (EYFS) statutory framework (DfE, 2026a), Working together to safeguard children, Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE) (DfE, 2026b) and further guidance relating to recruitment, online safety, safer eating, sleeping and other aspects of children’s welfare. These documents interact with one another, but that relationship is not always obvious when you are trying to run a setting at the same time. 

KCSIE – Keeping children safe in education – was introduced for schools in 2014 and has developed substantially since then. It provides a detailed safeguarding framework covering areas including staff knowledge, leadership responsibilities, safer recruitment, allegations concerning adults and child-on-child abuse. 

For early childhood providers, it is important to understand which statutory framework applies directly to your particular provision and where that framework requires you to consider or have regard to other guidance. The relationship between the EYFS and KCSIE has caused genuine confusion, particularly for providers outside maintained schools. 

The answer cannot simply be to hand educators a document approaching 200 pages and tell them to understand it. The task of leadership is to translate guidance into practice. What does it mean for the person opening the nursery tomorrow morning? What does the newest educator need to know? What does an agency member of staff need before beginning work? What must the designated safeguarding lead (DSL) understand that other educators may not need in the same depth? Safeguarding guidance has to become usable knowledge. 

Understanding safeguarding as a whole system

KCSIE provides a useful illustration of how broad safeguarding has become. Its five main parts consider different elements of the system: part one focuses on safeguarding information that staff need to understand; part two considers the management of safeguarding and the responsibilities of leadership; part three addresses safer recruitment; part four considers allegations and concerns relating to adults working with children; and part five addresses child-on-child sexual violence and harassment.

Rather than seeing these as five separate topics, we need to recognise that they depend on one another. Safer recruitment will not protect children on its own. Neither will safeguarding training, recording concerns or appointing a DSL. The strength comes from the way these elements work together. 

A setting needs people who have been recruited safely, inducted properly, trained appropriately and given clear ways to raise concerns. It needs leaders who review those concerns, recognise patterns and know when information must be shared or escalated. It also needs a culture in which challenging a colleague is understood as part of professional responsibility rather than disloyalty. 

Safer recruitment does not finish when somebody is appointed

One of the most significant areas of increasing expectation is safer recruitment. Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks, appropriate references and verification are important, but safer recruitment is much broader than completing pre-employment checks.

References need to be meaningful. They need to come from appropriate sources and be verified rather than simply accepted at face value. Recruitment processes need to explore suitability to work with children rather than focusing only on qualifications and availability. 

This becomes particularly important at a time when many settings are struggling with recruitment. When staffing is difficult, there can be enormous pressure to move quickly. But safeguarding cannot become the step that is shortened because another educator is urgently needed to maintain ratios. 

The same principle applies to agency educators, students and volunteers. A setting needs to understand what checks have taken place and what due diligence has been undertaken before somebody begins working with children. Induction is equally important. An educator should not need to work in a setting for several weeks before knowing who the DSL is or how to report something that worries them. 

From the beginning, people need to know: who do I speak to? What should I record? What happens once I have raised something? What happens if my concern relates to the person I would normally report to? These answers need to be obvious.

Safeguarding depends on what happens after somebody speaks up 

Many safeguarding reviews teach us the same painful lesson: somebody was worried. Sometimes an educator noticed something. Sometimes a parent raised a concern. Sometimes several apparently small concerns existed across different parts of an organisation. 

The problem was not necessarily that nobody saw anything. The problem was that the information was not heard, recorded, escalated or connected. This is why we need to think much more carefully about safeguarding chronology. 

A complaint from a parent may sit in one place. An accident record may sit somewhere else. A low-level concern about an adult might be kept separately again. A child’s comment may be recorded in another system. Individually, none of these pieces of information may appear significant, but together, they may tell a very different story. 

Good safeguarding systems make it possible for the DSL and leadership team to identify those patterns. Recording also protects the person raising the concern. Educators and parents need confidence that what they have reported has not disappeared into a verbal conversation with no clear outcome.

This does not mean creating a culture of surveillance or suspicion. It means creating a culture of professional curiosity and accountability. 

We need to make speaking up normal

The language we use matters. The term whistleblowing can sometimes make raising a concern sound like an extraordinary act: something somebody does when an organisation is already in serious trouble. We would rather create environments where speaking about something that feels uncomfortable is an ordinary part of safeguarding practice. 

A newly qualified educator should feel able to raise a concern about a room leader. An agency educator should know how to report something they have observed. A parent should know where to go if something does not feel right. And an experienced member of the team should be willing to challenge behaviour even when the person involved is well liked. 

That last point is particularly difficult. Safeguarding can be compromised by familiarity. When we know somebody, work alongside them and trust them professionally, it is uncomfortable to imagine that they could behave inappropriately. But safeguarding requires us to separate personal loyalty from professional responsibility. 

We should not wait until we are certain somebody has done something wrong. Educators are not investigators. Their responsibility is to notice, record and report concerns through the appropriate safeguarding process. Creating that culture takes repeated conversations. It cannot be achieved through one annual training session.

The DSL needs time, information and support

The designated safeguarding lead carries significant responsibility. The role includes far more than receiving a safeguarding form when somebody has a concern. DSLs may need to review chronologies, communicate with children’s social care, attend multi-agency meetings, support educators, update policies, deliver training and ensure actions are followed through. That requires protected time.

It also requires continuity. Safeguarding should never depend entirely on one person’s memory or inbox. There needs to be a clear relationship between the DSL and deputy designated safeguarding lead (DDSL), with appropriate access to the information needed to continue safeguarding work if somebody is unexpectedly absent. 

Ask yourself what would happen tomorrow if your DSL were suddenly unavailable. Would another appropriately trained person know which children were currently causing concern? Would they know what meetings were approaching? Would they know whether a referral had been made or a follow-up action was outstanding? 

If the answer depends on phoning one particular individual, the safeguarding system is vulnerable. We need systems that support people rather than systems that depend upon them.

Induction and training need to become more meaningful 

The volume of information educators are expected to understand has grown considerably. Safeguarding sits alongside first aid, health and safety, inclusion, food safety, safer eating, sleeping practices, online safety and many other responsibilities. Simply asking somebody to read 20 policies during induction is unlikely to create meaningful understanding. 

We need to think differently about professional learning. What are the essential things an educator needs to know immediately? What knowledge needs to be revisited regularly? How will we know whether people actually understand what they have read? This is particularly relevant where teams change frequently. 

Safeguarding needs repetition. It should appear in supervision, staff meetings, induction, scenario discussions and everyday professional conversations. Training should also help people practise difficult decisions. 

What would you do if a parent made an allegation at collection time? What if a colleague told you something that made you uncomfortable but asked you not to record it? What if the concern involved the manager? What if you noticed an injury shortly before children’s social care closed for the day? When educators have already thought through these possibilities, responding to a real situation becomes clearer. 

Parents must be part of the safeguarding culture

Safeguarding is not something settings do behind closed doors. Parents need accessible information about safeguarding procedures, who the relevant safeguarding leads are and how concerns or complaints can be raised. They also need to feel heard. 

In safeguarding and complaint investigations, defensiveness can make situations worse. When an organisation immediately starts from ‘That couldn’t have happened here’, it may miss what the parent is actually trying to communicate.

Listening does not mean automatically accepting every allegation as fact. It means taking the concern seriously enough to understand it properly. The process then needs to be fair to everyone involved: the child, the family, the educator and the organisation. Transparent procedures help create that balance. 

Preparing for change without becoming overwhelmed 

For smaller settings and childminders, the amount of new guidance can feel particularly difficult. There may be no compliance department, head office or dedicated safeguarding team. Often the owner, manager or childminder is trying to interpret guidance while simultaneously running the provision. 

Our advice is to resist trying to do everything at once. Start strategically. Review the statutory framework applying to your provision. Identify what has changed. Compare that with what you currently do, and then prioritise. 

Look at your safeguarding policy and reporting arrangements. Review the DSL and deputy arrangements where these roles apply. Examine recruitment and references. Consider induction. Review the practical safeguarding changes relevant to your provision, including areas such as safer eating and weaning, safer sleeping and the appropriate use of screens and digital devices. 
Some changes may require substantial training, while others may involve changing a sentence in a policy. Both can matter. A checklist can help, but a checklist should be the beginning rather than the end. For every requirement, ask: how will this actually happen in our setting? 

Read the source, not only somebody else’s interpretation

There is now a huge market for safeguarding advice, summaries, webinars, templates and technology. These things can be valuable and can help turn complex guidance into something manageable, but leaders still need to understand the source material.

Whether information comes from a consultant, a training provider, an online search or artificial intelligence, it remains somebody else’s interpretation until you have checked it against the relevant statutory guidance. Ultimately, the setting remains accountable for its practice. 

Use support, but undertake your own due diligence. And because safeguarding guidance changes, always check that you are using the current version applying to your provision.

Stronger safeguarding should not remove the joy of early childhood

There is a danger that conversations about early childhood become dominated by fear. Inspections, investigations, enforcement and safeguarding failures understandably attract attention. Yet if this becomes the only story we tell, we risk forgetting why educators entered the profession in the first place. 

Early childhood is full of extraordinary moments. Educators are there when children develop new relationships, find their voices, take first steps, discover what they can do and begin to make sense of themselves and other people. Safeguarding makes those experiences possible. 

It is not separate from the joy of early childhood. It protects the conditions in which that joy can exist. We can teach very young children that their feelings matter. We can help them develop language around consent, touch, secrets, relationships and asking adults for help. We can create environments in which they know adults will listen.

We can also create professional cultures where educators and families experience that same message: if something does not feel right, you are allowed to say so, and somebody will listen. 

The increased focus on safeguarding may feel uncomfortable. In many settings it will involve additional work and significant reflection, but stronger systems can also make the profession safer for everyone. 

The goal is not perfect paperwork. The goal is children who are safer because the adults around them notice, communicate, listen and act.