�ճ󾱲���Safeguarding Awareness Week, the largest school safeguarding survey 91���� has ever conducted has become a published report. 

More than 4,500 responses from school professionals across the UK and from international schools in over 50 countries, combined with the most current research from organisations including the Department for Education, the Internet Watch Foundation and the NSPCC – plus international groups including the Council of International Schools (CIS), Council of British International Schools (COBIS), International Taskforce on Child Protection (ITFCP) and Educational Collaborative for International Schools (ECIS) – have become a single, authoritative picture of what safeguarding and child protection in schools actually look like in 2026. 

Why this year is different 

Safeguarding Awareness Week has run since 2022, bringing the 91���� community together each year to explore what it means to feel safe in education.

This year’s theme focuses on what proactive safeguarding looks like in practice – and our 2026 report is different in scale, ambition and the specificity of what we are publishing. 

We asked about: 

• Culture, consistency and confidence 

• The reality of the safeguarding lead’s role and the impact on their wellbeing 

• Governance and what boards and trustees are actually testing 

• AI-generated harm and what protocols schools have in place to deal with it 

• What the sector wants most from safeguarding reform 

The answers to these questions are not always comfortable, and some of our findings will challenge assumptions that many schools currently hold about the strength of their own culture. 

Vitally, however, all of them are grounded in what school professionals actually reported, and that gives the report a credibility that frameworks built in meeting rooms cannot match. 

What the report gives you 

We have published an edition of our Safeguarding Report 2026 specifically for international schools. 

The international edition draws on 2,415 responses from British international schools, IB World Schools and other international settings across more than 50 countries and six world regions. 

It addresses the specific challenges of international education: 

• The variable compliance environment 

• The governance imperative when external systems are absent 

• Safer recruitment across borders 

• Staff turnover 

• Parental engagement across cultural difference 

• What strong practice looks like when there is no keeping children safe in education (KCSIE) to fall back on 

What else is launching this Safeguarding Awareness Week? 

Alongside the reports, for Safeguarding Awareness Week 2026 we're launching:

• The Global Safeguarding Principles Charter for international schools, grounded in the ITFCP, CIS, COBIS and ECIS frameworks and our survey evidence from more than 50 countries 

• Practical toolkits for safeguarding leads, headteachers and governors, covering proactive safeguarding, safeguarding lead wellbeing, and online harms protocols

• Assembly packs for primary and secondary schools, designed to support age‑appropriate conversations about safety, behaviour, online harms and culture

• Expert sofa sessions across the week, featuring senior safeguarding professionals, school leaders and sector organisations 

• Case studies from schools demonstrating what culture-led safeguarding looks like in action across different contexts plus much more 

The questions worth sitting with this Safeguarding Awareness Week 

There are three questions now worth putting to your leadership team or board. 

Not: is our safeguarding policy up to date? Not: have our staff completed their training? Those are compliance questions and their answers, while necessary, are not sufficient. 

The questions to ask are: 

• If safeguarding culture in our school is genuinely strong, where is the evidence for that beyond what we believe to be true? 

• Who would know first if it were starting to break down? 

• And is that the right person, in the right position, with the right support, to catch it in time? 

Those three questions are at the heart of what the 91���� Safeguarding Report 2026 explores. The answers, drawn from the largest safeguarding survey dataset in our history, will help you find out where your school genuinely sits, and where the most important work of the next twelve months lies. 

“Safeguarding culture is not what you have built on the best day. It is what holds on the worst day, with the least experienced person, in the most ambiguous situation.

That is the test. The report tells you how schools across the UK and world are passing or failing it.” 

91���� Safeguarding Report 2026

Download the report now to explore our findings.

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