Child-on-child abuse: what staff training must cover

Keeping children safe in education 2026 came into force on 1 September 2026, and part one tells every member of staff that children can abuse other children. The guidance calls this child-on-child abuse, and it says the abuse can happen inside school, outside it, and online. Any school designing child-on-child abuse training for staff should start with that text, because it is the clearest public description of what a teacher, a swimming coach or a librarian is being asked to notice.

Part one sets out what child-on-child abuse is most likely to include, and the list is deliberately wide. It covers bullying, including cyberbullying and prejudice-based bullying; discriminatory behaviour such as racism and faith-targeted abuse; abuse inside intimate relationships between children; physical abuse such as hitting, kicking, biting or hair pulling; serious assault or the threat of harm with a weapon; sexual violence; sexual harassment, including sexual comments, remarks and jokes; causing a child to take part in sexual activity without consent; the making or sharing of nudes and semi-nudes; upskirting; and initiation or hazing type violence and rituals. A member of staff who thinks of this only as fighting in the yard will miss most of the list.

The guidance adds an observation that changes how a school reads its own records. Where there are no reports, that does not mean nothing is happening, and it may mean nothing is being reported. When an accreditation team looks at a concerns log and finds a clean year across a secondary section of four hundred students, the honest reading is a question about the reporting route rather than proof of a safe campus. That question is usually answered by asking three teachers what they would do with a rumour they heard in a corridor.

The guidance names the failure directly. It says that downplaying certain behaviours, for example dismissing sexual harassment as "just banter", "just having a laugh", "part of growing up" or "boys being boys", can lead to a culture of unacceptable behaviour, misogyny and an unsafe environment for children, and in the worst case to a culture that normalises abuse so children stop coming forward. That sentence is the reason child-on-child abuse sits in staff training at all, rather than only in the safeguarding lead's procedure file.

The failure looks ordinary while it is happening. A boy puts his hand on a girl's waist as she walks past a Year 10 classroom, three of his friends laugh, and the girl laughs as well because four people are watching her. The teacher on duty sees it, reads the laughter as consent, and says nothing. Nothing is written down. In February the school counsellor learns that the girl has been taking the long route to her maths lesson since October.

Staff who let that pass are rarely indifferent. They lack a threshold they can apply in the four seconds the corridor gives them. A generic course teaches definitions, and definitions are recalled slowly; a corridor needs a decision. So the training has to rehearse the decision rather than the vocabulary, and it has to rehearse it in the corridors the staff actually walk.

Across the schools I have worked with, the modules that hold up under questioning cover five things and stop there. Depth matters more than breadth here, because a member of staff who half-remembers eleven categories will act on none of them.

• The forms the guidance lists, taught with examples from the school's own age range, buildings and online spaces.
• That child-on-child abuse is a safeguarding issue for both the victim and the alleged perpetrator, so both children get a response.
• The school's own reporting route: the named Designated Safeguarding Lead, the deputy, what happens out of hours, and where the record goes.
• That timely support can stop a child going on to cause harm, which is why early reporting is treated as prevention rather than as escalation.
• When children are at highest risk around the school day, including the twenty minutes immediately after dismissal and the spaces no adult is rostered to.

A commercial module can explain what sexual harassment is. It cannot tell a Grade 6 homeroom teacher in Astana that concerns go to a named person by the end of the same working day, that the record lives in the school's own log rather than in an email thread, that the teacher does not question the children, and that the deputy DSL covers Thursdays. Those four facts are what the teacher needs at the moment it happens, and they exist only in the school's own policy.

Handling both children is the second half that generic content skips. The school decides who supports the child who was harmed, who works with the child who caused the harm, whether timetables or seating change, who speaks to each set of parents, and who records the risk assessment. Staff do not need to make those decisions, but they need to know the decisions exist and belong to the DSL. Otherwise a well-meaning form tutor starts an investigation of their own, and the school loses both the evidence and the child's trust. The role of the Designated Safeguarding Lead in an international school is the anchor for all of it.

Schools outside England are not inspected against Keeping children safe in education unless they are British schools overseas, inspected under the British Schools Overseas standards. Many international schools still adopt the guidance as their reference because their accreditation bodies expect a recognised framework and because the list above is more useful than anything they would write from scratch. The practical question is which parts transfer, which is covered in what applies to international schools outside England.

The method that produces a usable module is unglamorous. The DSL lists the six places where the school's own concerns actually arise: the bus queue at 15:40, the pool changing rooms, the back field behind the sports hall, the year-group messaging chat that no adult is in, the boarding corridor after lights out, and the taxi rank parents use. Each place becomes one scenario. Nobody has to invent a case study set in a British comprehensive.

A scenario that works is short, ambiguous and ends with a decision rather than a definition. One paragraph describes what a member of staff sees or hears. The question is what that person does in the next ten minutes. The answer options are the school's own options: speak to the children, tell the DSL now, write it in the log tonight, do nothing. Staff pick, and the feedback explains why the school's policy points where it does. That is how a definition becomes a threshold. The longer method is set out in scenario-based training written from your own policy.

Scenarios age quickly, which is an argument for writing them cheaply and replacing them yearly rather than buying them once. When a school changes its dismissal routine or opens a new building, three of the six scenarios stop matching the site. Staff notice immediately, and a module that describes a corridor the school no longer has loses its authority in the first minute.

In an international school the phrase child-on-child abuse has to survive translation, and often it does not. Russian and Kazakh have settled words for bullying, and a translator reaching for the nearest term will produce a module about bullying alone. Everything from sexual harassment to initiation rituals falls out of the text, and the staff who read the translated version end up trained on a narrower category than their English-reading colleagues. The school then believes it has one standard when it has two.

The same problem hits the word banter. The nearest Russian equivalents carry the sense of friendly joking among people who like each other, which removes exactly the part the guidance is warning about. A translator working alone will choose the friendly word, because in ordinary use it is the right one. The fix is a glossary agreed with the DSL before any module is written, fixing each safeguarding term in each language and keeping the English term alongside it. That distinction between translating and localising is the subject of safeguarding training in the languages your staff speak.

One more adjustment matters in schools where staff and students share a first language other than English. Judgements about teasing are made against local norms, and those norms differ from the ones the guidance assumes. A driver, a nurse or a teaching assistant may read a scene as normal because it was normal where they grew up. Training that acknowledges this openly, and then states the school's threshold plainly, gets further than training that pretends the norms are already shared.

I have worked in international education since 2008, as an IB and MYP teacher, an IB DP economics teacher, an IB and CIS evaluator and workshop leader, and most recently as CIS accreditation coordinator at Miras International School in Astana. I am not a Designated Safeguarding Lead, which is why SafeguardIS builds training from the school's own safeguarding and child protection policies rather than from my opinion. What staff learn is what that school actually does, including its reporting route and its named people.

Every module passes through the same check before staff see it. The DSL reads it, approves it by name, and that approval, together with a content hash, sits in the record an evaluator can ask for later. Certificates carry the same accountability, countersigned by the Head of School and the DSL, with a code anyone can check on a public verification page. Training ships in English, Russian and Kazakh today. If your staff work in a language the platform does not ship yet, I build that language in for your school as part of the pilot.

Staff can also ask the AI policy assistant questions that are answered from the school's own policies, which helps a teacher who has forgotten who covers Thursdays. The DSL keeps every safeguarding decision, and no child's details belong in a chat window. Miras International School in Astana is the pilot school. If you want to see how a child-on-child abuse module reads when it is written from your own procedure, book a 20-minute walkthrough.