Keeping children safe in education 2026: five parts and the records it asks for

What KCSIE is, and who must follow it

Keeping children safe in education is statutory guidance from the Department for Education. It sets out the legal duties schools in England must comply with to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people under the age of 18. Schools and colleges must have regard to it; it is not optional safeguarding guidance.

It applies to all schools and colleges in England: maintained schools, academies and free schools, independent schools, non-maintained special schools, pupil referral units and alternative provision. Governors and trustees are in scope as well as education staff, and Ofsted inspects against it.

Statutory means it is not advice. Governing bodies, proprietors and school and college staff must have regard to it, and inspectors will expect to see that you have. It is read alongside Working together to safeguard children, which covers the wider multi-agency system including social care.

The current version is Keeping children safe in education 2026, in force from 1 September 2026. It replaced KCSIE 2025. Because it is reissued annually, the single most useful habit is to check the date on the copy your school is actually working from each September.

Alongside it sit the DfE's departmental advice and the Prevent duty guidance, plus your local safeguarding partnership's own guidance and resources. KCSIE is the statutory safeguarding spine; those fill in the detail on specific safeguarding issues.

The five parts of KCSIE

The guidance for schools and colleges is organised in five parts, and knowing which part answers which question saves a great deal of searching.

Part 1 is the one all education staff must read. It sets out what schools expect of every adult in the building: how to recognise that a child is being abused, what to do if you are worried a child is at risk of harm, and how early help works before a concern becomes a referral to children's social care.

1. Part 1: safeguarding information for all staff. What every member of school and college staff should know and do – the forms abuse and neglect take, the specific safeguarding issues such as child criminal exploitation, county lines, child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse and female genital mutilation, and what to do if they have safeguarding concerns.
2. Part 2: the management of safeguarding. The responsibilities of governing bodies and proprietors, the role of the designated safeguarding lead, online safety, filtering and monitoring, and the policies that must be in place.
3. Part 3: safer recruitment. The checks required for anyone working in or visiting a school or college, including regulated activity and the single central record.
4. Part 4: allegations made about staff. How to manage concerns and allegations about teachers and other staff, including supply teachers, volunteers and contractors.
5. Part 5: child-on-child sexual violence and sexual harassment. How schools and colleges should respond when children abuse other children.

Behind the five parts sit the annexes, which is where a good deal of the practical material lives.

Part 5 is worth naming properly, because the shorthand hides it: sexual harassment between children, and sexual violence, in schools and colleges. Harassment between children in schools is treated as a safeguarding matter rather than as behaviour, which is a distinction that changes who handles it.

The annexes carry information on specific safeguarding issues – one entry per issue, designed to help a designated safeguarding lead brief staff quickly rather than to be read end to end. Part 1 is different: every member of staff must read part one in full, and the school records that they have.

What changed in KCSIE 2026

One change is worth knowing even if you read nothing else, because it changes who has to read what.

The shorter version of part 1 has been removed from Annex A. The Department for Education's stated effect is that all staff now follow the same safeguarding expectations, and that governing bodies and proprietors should make sure that all staff read part 1, including those who do not work directly with children. Schools that had been issuing the condensed version to caretakers, catering, office and site staff need to change what they hand out and re-record who has read what.

Beyond Part one, Keeping children safe in education 2026 lists its changes part by part in Annex C. The ones that alter what a school checks or records:

• Part one, all staff. Early help is now split between community-based early help and targeted early help delivered through Family Help, the content on child-on-child abuse, criminal and sexual exploitation, mental health and serious violence is expanded or substantially updated, modern slavery is added, and a concern or allegation about another member of staff goes to the headteacher or principal, "who will consider whether an onward referral to the LADO is required".
• Part two, the management of safeguarding. New sections on a mobile phone policy, sport, school premises, boarding and residential accommodation, young carers and children with medical conditions; guidance on the safe and effective use of generative AI; data protection updated for the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025; and expectations for robust cover when the designated safeguarding lead is unavailable.
• Filtering and monitoring. Reworded: a review of effectiveness at least once every academic year, carried out by the senior leadership team member responsible, with the designated safeguarding lead and IT support, including checks that filtering works on all internet-connected devices, and "a record should be kept of these checks".
• Part three, safer recruitment. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the supervision exemption, so a volunteer who teaches, trains, instructs or supervises children "on more than 3 days in a month or overnight is now in regulated activity". References to the TRA Employer Access Service now point to the DfE's Check a teacher's record service.
• Parts four and five. Part four adds trainee teachers throughout and sets expectations for concerns about them. Part five is substantially rewritten around the continuum from harmful sexual behaviour to sexual violence, and every incident of sharing nudes or semi-nudes, consensual or not, requires a safeguarding response.
• The annexes. Annex A is now the further information on specific safeguarding issues (formerly Annex B), Annex B the role of the designated safeguarding lead (formerly Annex C), and Annex C the summary of changes; the former Annex E on supervised activity is removed.

The full summary of changes introduced in Keeping children safe in education 2026 is in Annex C. Read that annex rather than any third-party summary, including this one: the changes are the part most likely to be reported inaccurately, and yours is the version that matters.

For the avoidance of doubt on dates: KCSIE 2026 comes into force on 1 September 2026 and replaces the version that came into force in September 2025. Annex C summarises the changes; additional information on each specific safeguarding issue sits in the annexes rather than in the five parts.

What KCSIE requires you to record

Recording is not gathered into one section, which is part of why it is easy to miss. It appears as an obligation in four different places.

The through-line is that statutory guidance for schools treats recording as part of safeguarding practice, not as administration that follows it. Safeguarding children and promoting the welfare of children both depend on somebody being able to see a pattern later, and a pattern is only visible in writing.

• Concerns raised by staff. Part 1 is clear that any member of staff with a concern about a child should act immediately and speak to the designated safeguarding lead. Schools are expected to keep detailed, accurate and securely held written records of concerns, even where there is no referral, because a pattern only becomes visible across several small entries.
• Decisions and their reasons. It is not enough to record that a concern was raised. What was decided, by whom, and why – including a decision to take no further action – is what a later review will ask for.
• Allegations about staff. Part 4 sets expectations for recording allegations and their outcome, including what is placed on a personnel file and how long it is kept.
• Recruitment and vetting checks. Part 3 requires the single central record, covered below.

Two qualities are asked for repeatedly and are worth holding onto: records should be contemporaneous, written at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards, and they should be legible to somebody else. A record only you can interpret is not a record the school can produce.

Concerns about another staff member follow the part 4 route rather than the ordinary one, and should be recorded there. Your child protection policy should say which route applies to what, in words a new member of staff can act on in their first week.

The purpose of all of it is narrow and worth restating: to reduce the risk of harm to children in schools and colleges by making sure that what one adult noticed is available to the next one. Working with children and families depends on that continuity, and continuity is a records property.

The single central record

Part 3 requires every school and college to maintain a single central record of the recruitment and vetting checks carried out on staff, and on governors and volunteers where relevant. It is the one KCSIE record with a name of its own, and the one an inspector will ask for first.

It is a register rather than a filing cabinet: it records that a check was done and when, while the underlying evidence sits elsewhere. Keeping it accurate as people join and leave is ordinary administrative discipline, and it is the most common place a school is found wanting for reasons that have nothing to do with child protection practice.

What the register may hold, how long a certificate copy may exist and where copies must never go is a subject of its own: see our DBS record-keeping guide.

The child protection file: what it holds, who sees it, and how it moves

Annex B of KCSIE 2026 gives the child protection file a fuller description than any earlier edition. "The designated safeguarding lead is responsible for ensuring that child protection files are kept up to date. Information should be kept confidential and stored securely. It is good practice to keep concerns and referrals in a separate child protection file for each child." And the quality standard: "Safeguarding records should be clear, factual, and distinguish between observed concerns, professional opinion, and historic information."

It also says what the file should contain. "Records should include: a clear and comprehensive summary of the concern, details of how the concern was followed up and resolved, and a note of any action taken, decisions reached and the outcome." Access is limited to "those who need to see it", and sharing follows the information sharing advice in Parts one and two. Our MASH referral guide follows one concern through those stages and the record kept at each.

Transfer has a clock. "Where children leave the school or college (including in year transfers) the designated safeguarding lead should ensure their child protection file is transferred to the new school or college as soon as possible, and within 5 days for an in-year transfer or within the first 5 days of the start of a new term." It is transferred "separately from the main pupil file, ensuring secure transit, and confirmation of receipt should be obtained", and the 2026 text adds that the exporting school "should include a clear, structured summary identifying current safeguarding concerns, relevant context, and any ongoing support needs", taking "particular care" to distinguish current concerns from historic information. The receiving school reviews it with a trained member of staff and seeks clarification where it is unclear or incomplete.

This is where recording quality becomes visible. A file of dated, specific entries transfers meaning. A file of thin notes referring to conversations held elsewhere transfers paper, and the structured summary the guidance now asks for cannot be written from it. Schools receiving a child mid-year will recognise the difference immediately. The mechanics of the move itself are in our guide to child protection file transfer.

Retention is set by the Department for Education's record-keeping guidance for schools, checked in September 2026: a child protection file is retained "until the child's 25th birthday", and "if the file relates to child sexual abuse, retain until the child's 75th birthday". Records of allegations against staff, including unfounded ones, are kept "until the staff member's normal retirement age, or 10 years from the date of the allegation, whichever is later", and they are kept separately from the child's file under the Part 4 route. Those are the DfE's figures for record retention, storage and destruction; an academy trust should check its own retention schedule says the same, and the Information and Records Management Society's toolkit for schools remains a useful supporting reference where the DfE is silent. Early years settings and the wider children's sector apply the same standard through their own guidance. Two further points. Part 4 says details of allegations found to have been malicious or false should be removed from personnel records unless the individual consents to their retention, and Annex B says DSLs and their deputies should be equipped to keep detailed, accurate, secure written records, because the quality of the file is the quality of the safeguarding.

The recording gap most schools have

Ask a school where its safeguarding records are and the answer is confident: the safeguarding system, the child protection file, the single central record. Those are usually in good order.

Now ask where a concern is first raised. Increasingly it is a message between two members of staff at the end of a day, a photograph sent to a phone, a question in a staff group chat about whether anyone else has noticed something about a child. That is the moment KCSIE part 1 is describing – a member of staff acting on a concern – and it is happening on personal devices the school does not own.

The consequence is not that the concern goes unrecorded, though sometimes it does. It is that the school cannot evidence the sequence. When a local authority enquiry or a local child safeguarding practice review asks what was known and when, the safeguarding system shows the entry made two days later and nothing about the two days before it. Where staff acted well and early, that is precisely the evidence that cannot be produced.

This is a governance question rather than a safeguarding-practice one, and it is worth ten minutes with your designated safeguarding lead whether or not anything changes. Two honest limits, including on products like ours. No product like ours can recover conversations that have already happened elsewhere, and a school cannot simply read a member of staff's personal phone: the ICO says "it would be difficult to justify accessing a worker's personal communications", though staff can be asked to search their own devices for a subject access request. And a policy banning group chats without providing something equally quick simply moves them. Our guide to staff WhatsApp groups in schools covers what a workable policy actually says.

Questions people ask

Why is record keeping important in safeguarding?

Record keeping matters because Keeping children safe in education 2026 lists poor record keeping among the examples of poor practice that research and local child safeguarding practice reviews have repeatedly shown to be dangerous, alongside failing to act on the early signs of abuse and neglect. KCSIE adds that written records of concerns, discussions and decisions, with their reasons, also help if the school has to respond to a complaint about how a case was handled.

Is there a difference between child protection and safeguarding?

Yes: child protection is the narrower part of safeguarding. Working together to safeguard children 2026 defines child protection as activity undertaken to protect specific children who are suspected to be suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm, while KCSIE defines safeguarding and promoting welfare far more widely, from providing help as soon as problems emerge to taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.

What are the key changes to safeguarding in 2026?

For schools and colleges in England, KCSIE 2026, in force from 1 September 2026, expects all staff to read Part one in full now that the condensed Annex A version is withdrawn, adds a new section on mobile phone policy and guidance on the safe and effective use of generative AI, updates the definitions of online risk categories and removes the supervision exemption from regulated activity, as its Annex C summary of changes sets out. Separately, the information sharing duty in section 16LA of the Children Act 2004 came into force on 30 September 2026, as the DfE's Information sharing to safeguard children and young people guidance records.

What is safeguarding in schools?

Safeguarding in schools is the duty to protect pupils from harm and promote their welfare, and Keeping children safe in education 2026 defines safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children as providing help and support as soon as problems emerge, protecting children from maltreatment within or outside the home, including online, preventing the impairment of their mental and physical health or development, ensuring they grow up in circumstances consistent with safe and effective care, and taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes. KCSIE says it is everyone's responsibility, and that children means everyone under the age of 18. The legal duty sits in section 175 of the Education Act 2002 for maintained schools and colleges, and in the Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014 for independent schools and academies.

Where to read the guidance

Read the source. Keeping children safe in education on GOV.UK carries the full document, part 1 on its own, and the part one overview for all staff. Annex C has the summary of changes. NSPCC Learning publishes a reliable briefing each year, and your local safeguarding partnership sets the referral routes your staff actually follow.

This page is a summary of statutory guidance, not a substitute for it and not legal advice. Where a decision concerns a specific child, follow your own procedures and speak to your designated safeguarding lead.