Keeping Children Safe

This year's KCSIE 2023 amendments are relatively light touch and the majority reflect changes we've seen to the law and guidance since KCSIE 2022 came into force last September.

Key changes in KCSIE 2023 relate to the following:

• Online safety, filtering and monitoring - Placing more emphasis on the requirement for governing bodies to ensure that their schools have appropriate and effective filtering and monitoring systems in place. This reflects the DfE's new filtering and monitoring standards published in March 2023.
• Safeguarding risks faced by children being absent from education for prolonged periods and/or on repeat occasions and the difference between this and children missing from education - This reflects the Government's drive to tackle absenteeism and is consistent with Working together to improve school attendance which came into force in September 2022.
• Online recruitment checks for shortlisted candidates - Clarification that it is good practice for schools to inform shortlisted candidates that online searches will be carried out if you do so. There is however no requirement to carry out online searches.
• Use of school premises by third parties - For the third year in a row we have seen clarification of the guidance around third party use of school premises, indicating that is still some uncertainty about the requirements. If schools receive safeguarding allegations relating to an incident that happened when a separate organisation/individual was using their premises for the purpose of running activities with children, the school should manage this in line with their own safeguarding policies and procedures and inform the LADO where required.
• Forced marriage - Since February 2023 it has been a crime to carry out any conduct whose purpose is to cause a child to marry before their 18th birthday, even if threats or another form of coercion are not used. The guidance applies to non-binding, unofficial marriages, as well as legal marriages where they are forced.

As always, we have been working to support schools to deal with these changes. We have:

• updated our safeguarding policy template and we are ready to share this or to review your school's own policies from now on
• produced a detailed summary of the changes and recommended actions which flow from them in a compliance toolkit update and we will also be providing subscribers with a regulatory update for Inset
• are updating both our Part 1 and Part 2 KCSIE modules on our VWV Plus eLearning Solutions platform so they are ready for Inset

For additional information on the latest Protect duty guidance for schools, please see here.

If you would like more information about any of these products, or about safeguarding more generally, please contact Nicola Tarmey in our Regulatory Compliance team on 0117 314 5439. Alternatively, please complete the form below.