The role of the designated safeguarding lead has changed more in the past decade than almost any other leadership position in education. How much time schools have given to acknowledging that is something far less clear.
Safeguarding leadership no longer looks the same from school to school. Across many trusts, it already spans multiple schools because the specialism has outgrown any single site.
Within schools, the DSL being on the SLT is now expected, but the best schools give the role genuine authority, recognising that it shapes culture rather than simply responding to crises. Too many still give the title a seat at the table without the time, status or remit to do more than firefight.
DSLs now have many more responsibilities
Having led safeguarding across both UK and international schools, I have seen the same pattern emerge. The legal frameworks and cultural contexts may differ, but the responsibilities and scope of the role continue to grow wherever you lead.
How did we get here, and why does it matter so much? The safeguarding remit has not simply grown. It has grown exponentially, and most of that growth has nothing to do with the threats that make headlines.
A DSL a decade ago was largely managing disclosures, child protection, concerns about abuse and the grinding casework that sat underneath it all, with safeguarding, special educational needs and disabilities, attendance and inclusion still treated as separate conversations, run by separate people.
Today the role increasingly centres on anticipating harm, preventing harm and shaping the culture that determines whether harm is identified at all.
Everything connects to safeguarding
Underneath it lies an older truth that schools are only now starting to join up.
Pastoral welfare, mainstream inclusion, alternative provision, counselling and nurture provision, SEND, challenging behaviour and vulnerability to exclusion all sit on the same continuum as safeguarding.
None of them distinguish themselves cleanly from the safeguarding remit, and all of them demand careful, ongoing leadership and strategic focus in their own right. The job has not just been added to. It has converged.
What has not kept pace is the investment behind the role. The job has multiplied, but the staffing, training and authority have barely moved.
Beyond being identified as a senior leader, the statutory minimum training requirement for many DSLs remains a Level 3 safeguarding course that can be completed in a single day.
Too many still do this work in the gaps of a timetable or a deputy head’s diary, trying to assemble a picture of the whole child from systems that were never designed to connect.
That is the uncomfortable truth behind even the best version of this.
Why culture supersedes everything
No single playbook exists for half of what now lands on a DSL’s desk, and no single system joins up the knowledge in the safeguarding file with what the wider team of professionals across a setting know.
Good DSLs make the right call anyway, because the job has always required judgement, not process. Compliance is the floor. Culture is what your school actually does when nobody is checking, and that is the ceiling the role needs: the time and remit to build.
Schools increasingly succeed or fail not because of the quality of their safeguarding procedures, but because of the quality of the leadership that joins safeguarding to every other aspect of school life.
With Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 landing, schools have another opportunity to ask whether their model is fit for what the role has become, not what it used to be.
Have governors, headteachers and leadership teams actually taken the time to step back and see this challenge for what it is, or are they quietly hoping that what is already in place will cope, rather than buckle, under the next wave of legislative and educational expectation?
Is your setting ready?
Two questions follow from that, and they are not the same question asked twice.
The first is about capacity: how has your school actually planned for this expanded role, what capacity has it created and how has it assured that the DSL is not the last bastion or the sole hero, but a critically thoughtful and skilled leader, or leaders, properly equipped for what the job now demands?
The second is about remit: what authority are they actually given, and where do they sit in shaping the school’s identity, the culture of values, character, wellbeing, stakeholder happiness and shared efficacy that sit alongside, not beneath, the essential work of child protection, training, tracking, monitoring and management?
Neither question can be answered by a job title alone.
The DSL has quietly become one of the school’s central systems leaders, connecting information, people, services, culture and professional judgement across the organisation.
It is time for schools to lead, structure and resource the role as though they understand that.
David Strange is a founding middle school headteacher and whole-school designated safeguarding lead in Doha, Qatar. He previously worked in the UK for 19 years in various senior leadership roles, and across these settings he has continuously held the role of DSL since 2014
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