Bridging the safeguarding gap

This report draws on formal and informal consultation with members of our Safeguarding Professional Community to explore how school trusts engage with local children’s safeguarding partnerships (LCSPs), the barriers they face, and the case for strengthening education’s role in local safeguarding arrangements. 

We have confirmed that although trusts and their safeguarding leaders hold significant expertise, grounded in close and consistent contact with children and families, but that this insight is not always reflected in local partnership structures. Although the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 did not make education a fourth statutory safeguarding partner, it reinforced expectations that education should be fully involved at both strategic and operational levels. This report therefore examines the gap between education’s contribution in practice and its position in local safeguarding governance and identifies practical steps that could improve participation and influence now.

• Engagement with LCSPs is uneven: some trusts are well connected, while others report little or no meaningful interaction.
• The main barriers identified were weak communication, limited access to decision-makers, gatekeeping of information, time pressures, and inconsistent understanding of the trust model within local safeguarding systems.
• Respondents across leadership levels said education’s voice is too often treated as operational rather than strategic, despite schools’ central role in identifying risk, vulnerability and need.
• There was strong support for strengthening education’s role, including through statutory recognition, although some respondents also highlighted practical questions about representation, capacity and accountability.
• Members identified clear opportunities for improvement now, including stronger local relationships, clearer communication routes, better guidance on structures and escalation, and a practical toolkit to help trusts navigate their LCSPs more effectively.

In May 2026 the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act mandated statutory partners to fully include and represent education at all strategic and operational levels, but stopped short of making schools a formal fourth statutory partner. While the report makes the case for education as a statutory partner we acknowledge that for now alternative means to enhance collaboration will need to be explored until any further legislative change.

Recommendations

This report is deliberately restrained in its recommendations. Its purpose is to bring together relevant perspectives and establish the foundations for more robust safeguarding partnerships in the future. Nevertheless, we consider that the following actions would strengthen safeguarding:

• Trusts should collaborate to develop a toolkit to support effective engagement with their LCSP and to facilitate the sharing of best practice.
• Non-school safeguarding agencies should engage with trusts to develop toolkits for their own use.
• Government should collaborate with CST and the wider education sector to investigate routes to establishing education as statutory partner.