Another new year looms, and with it the usual mix of policies, proposals and law changes that schools need to be aware of - including within the vital area of safeguarding.
While none of the below is guaranteed, this list offers insights on the expected changes in a raft of areas of legislation that schools and safeguarding leads need to know about.
1. Embedding safeguarding teams
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently at the reporting stage in the House of Lords and so coming into effect quite soon, contains several notable changes.
One of the most significant is formally embedding education within local safeguarding arrangements and creating new multi-agency child protection teams in every area, each with an education representative.
Alongside this, a new legal duty to share safeguarding-relevant information and the introduction of a single consistent identifier for every child will transform how schools exchange data with police, health and social care. Designated safeguarding leads and senior leaders will have to adapt quickly to far greater expectations around cross-agency work.
2. Register of children not in school
A second major area of reform is the regulation of children not in school and in home education. Every local authority will maintain a mandatory register of children not in school, and parents will lose the automatic right to home educate if there is a child protection investigation or plan in place.
Local authorities will have stronger powers to issue school attendance orders. Schools should expect more oversight, more information requests and a more formalised process whenever parents seek to withdraw their children for home education.
The bill also strengthens the responsibilities of local authorities towards children in need, in kinship care and care leavers, introducing new expectations on promoting educational achievement and supporting transitions into adulthood.
For schools, this will increase engagement with virtual school heads and heighten demand for attendance, progress and pastoral information for vulnerable pupils.
3. New RSHE guidance
Over the summer the Department for Education released updated relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) statutory guidance, which set out a raft of new requirements.
This included the need to: teach the legal facts about biological sex and about gender reassignment as a protected characteristic; use proper names for body parts; avoid presenting any particular view of gender identity as established fact; and handle any sensitive content with appropriate care.
This legislation will come into effect from September 2026, meaning schools will need to ensure adequate training for staff and curriculum planning begins this academic year.
4. Supporting gender-questioning pupils
Linked to the above, a separate document on supporting gender-questioning pupils is still expected, and the nature of the questions asked in the consultation offers the best sense of what its eventual emphasis might be.
The repeated emphasis on how and when parents must be engaged, the weight given to parental views, and questions around managing disagreement all point to a framework in which schools are not expected to act without parental knowledge or consent, except where safeguarding indicates otherwise.
The consultation also signals a move towards a more cautious, structured approach to any request for change in gender status, with a likely expectation of “watchful waiting” while schools assess the wider implications for the child and the school community.
The detailed questioning around when schools should refuse requests, what factors must be considered and how decisions should be justified suggests that leaders will be required to demonstrate a consistent, defensible process rather than relying on discretion or custom.
Finally, there is a clear direction towards reinforcing sex-based provisions in areas such as toilets, changing rooms, boarding accommodation, PE and sport, as the consultation repeatedly asks when schools must refuse access to opposite-sex facilities, what alternative arrangements should look like, and how fairness and safety are to be assessed.
This suggests that future guidance will expect schools to prioritise safeguarding, physical safety and Equality Act compliance when considering requests that would place a child in single-sex spaces designated for the opposite sex.
5. Strengthening international safeguarding
Elsewhere, work is underway among international school organisations to tighten regulations around their ability to report British-registered teachers to the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), and have more direct access to Department for Education regulatory portals.
A meeting involving the British International Schools Safeguarding Coalition (BISSC) in the House of Lords in December, attended by organisations including the TRA, the National Crime Agency, Interpol and the US State Department, suggests action may well come to pass.
6. Keeping Children Safe in Education
Finally, there had been an expectation that the 2025 Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance would contain substantial changes. However, that never happened - and even the minimal updates that did occur were rolled out very late.
It would seem logical, then, that the next iteration of KCSIE may be the promised major evolution that was expected in 2025. As such, it’s one worth keeping an especially close eye on.
Luke Ramsden is deputy head of an independent school and chair of trustees for the Schools Consent Project
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