ChildSafeguarding.com alternatives for international schools

A Russian-speaking head of school looking for safeguarding training in their own language usually lands on ChildSafeguarding.com first. The site is run by eLearn International Pte Ltd in Singapore, co-founded and led by Matt Harris, Ed.D., and has published child protection e-learning since 2020. This is an independent comparison. I have no commercial relationship with eLearn International, nothing here was written with their involvement, and every fact below comes from their own public pages, which I fetched on 10 September 2026.

The course line is organised by who the learner is rather than by level alone. Their courses page lists awareness training for support staff, Level 1 Fundamental Child Protection Training for Educators, a course for board members, owners and senior leaders, a course for sports coaches, one for supplementary and specialist teachers, one for volunteers, and a tutorial for parents. The support staff course runs 60 to 90 minutes and names its audience plainly: cleaners, bus drivers, security guards, facilities staff, food service workers, office staff and gardeners. The educators course runs about three hours, covers duty of care, abuse types and indicators, and concerns and disclosures, and issues a Certificate of Achievement to a learner who scores 80% on the final assessment. Both pages state that the course is certified by The CPD Certification Service as conforming to continuing professional development principles.

Pricing is published, which is rarer in this market than it should be. At the time of writing their buy page sells credits at $25.00 each for 1 to 99 credits, $2,300 for 100, $5,000 for 250 and $9,000 for 500, with custom pricing above that and all prices in US dollars. The support staff course costs one credit per learner; the educators and leadership courses cost two. Credits work on any course in any language and do not expire. Access is designed for people who have no school email account. The learner opens a code, types a name, and begins. That matters for a kitchen team or a bus fleet, and it is why their support staff tier reaches adults that a licence tied to a staff directory never reaches.

Their languages page lists Russian and Kazakh in its language index, and each has a page of its own. The Russian page shows one course: Child Protection Awareness Training for Support Staff, published as Ознакомительный Курс По Защите Детей, in five parts, with the translator and the reviewer named on the page and a Russian certificate of completion displayed. The Kazakh page has the same shape, carrying Балаларды Қорғау Туралы Ақпараттық Курсы with its own named translator and reviewer. The country pages agree with both: the Kazakhstan page names English and Kazakh, the Russia page names English and Russian.

That is real work. Heads in this region have told me that safeguarding training in Russian does not exist, and they are wrong. It exists, it was translated by named people rather than by a machine, and their languages page describes the method: "Our translations are conducted by mother tongue educators. They know the verbiage and colloquial language needed for adults working with children. All translations are reviewed by other educators for clarity and accuracy." A school that needs its cleaners and drivers trained in Russian or Kazakh can have that this week.

That leaves the question of tier. On their pages today, the course carried in Russian and Kazakh is the support staff awareness course. The per-course language sections further down the languages page name a shorter set for the educators course, and Russian and Kazakh do not appear in that set. So a teacher-level or designated safeguarding lead course delivered in Russian sits outside what those pages currently show. Ask them directly. A marketing page and a supplier's capability are different things, and one email settles it.

Their platform does more school-specific work than a stock library usually does. A school can add its logo and its own reporting information to the course, including the name, job title and contact details of the designated safeguarding lead. That information appears several times inside the course at the points where reporting is discussed, and their educators course page states that when a school updates it the change carries through to subsequent sessions and certificates, including reprinted ones. A member of staff who finishes that course has read the name of the person they must tell.

The teaching itself stays constant, by design. Their educators page puts the principle in one sentence: "Every learner receives the same learning experience regardless of language." Consistency across languages and countries is the product. Their homepage counted 39 languages, 115 countries served and more than 100,000 issued certificates on the day I fetched it, and a figure like that drifts the same way a language count does, so read it off their page rather than off mine. For a company selling one curriculum into schools in that many countries, holding the teaching steady is the right decision. The consequence for a single school is that the case studies, the thresholds and the decision points come from the curriculum rather than from that school's own child protection policy.

That distinction matters most where policies differ from each other rather than from the law. Two schools with almost identical documents will draw the line between a note and an allegation in different places, will set different deadlines for passing a concern on, and will route a concern about a colleague through different people. A course that teaches recognition well can still leave a teacher unsure which of those routes this school uses on a Tuesday afternoon. I have written about that gap in generic e-learning compared with school-specific training and in scenario-based training built from your own policy.

There is a school where they are the right answer and I am not. It has forty or fifty non-teaching staff with several mother tongues among them, no consultancy budget this year, and an accreditation visit or an insurance condition that needs every adult on site certificated. Almost nobody in that group has a school email address. The work has to be finished in a fortnight.

Buy the credits. The school pays one credit per learner on the support staff course and gets a code instead of a login, 60 to 90 minutes of content written for adults of any literacy level, and a certificate their page says is valid for two years. There is no workshop to schedule around the timetable. Their buy page states that purchased credits never expire and can be used on any available course or language. That is worth more than it looks on a price list, because a school can buy in September, cover a new driver in March, and run him in Kazakh instead of English without raising another purchase order. Non-teaching staff need a different design from the teacher module, and their support staff course was built for exactly those roles, a case I make in training for non-teaching staff. A live engagement cannot beat that on speed or on price.

A school outside the countries where I can deliver on site should buy a self-serve course rather than wait for a visit that is not coming. Parents are another case, because I sell nothing for them at all. Their buy page prices the parent tutorial at 15 credits a year for unlimited sessions, so a whole parent body costs about what a handful of staff seats costs. And a school that wants an externally certified line on its training record will find The CPD Certification Service mark on their courses. SafeguardIS holds no external accreditation or certification of any kind, and I would rather a Head read that here than discover it in a meeting.

I have worked in international education since 2008, as an IB teacher and coordinator, a CIS and IB evaluator, an IB workshop leader, and most recently as CIS accreditation coordinator at Miras International School in Astana, now the pilot school for SafeguardIS. The whole thing came out of a problem I met there. The safeguarding training available to the school was written for another country, and the staff who most needed it worked in Russian and Kazakh.

There are three things, each with a fixed scope and a fixed fee. The first is a live on-site workshop day for teachers, support staff and leadership, delivered in English and in Russian, with role-specific scenarios written from that school's own policies, so the decision a teacher practises is the decision the policy asks for. The second is a whole-school safeguarding audit: a policy-by-policy review against International Task Force for Child Protection guidance and the legislation the school works under, ending in a written action plan. The training maps to that guidance. The bodies that signed it do not endorse, accredit or affiliate with SafeguardIS, and no part of what I sell is accredited or certified by anyone.

The third is the platform, which turns the school's own policy documents into training modules that the designated safeguarding lead reviews and approves before any member of staff sees them. Completions are recorded as staff train, certificates are countersigned by the Head of School and the designated safeguarding lead, and each certificate carries a code anyone can check on a public verification page. Each engagement includes twelve months of platform access for all staff. I train teachers and leaders in Russian, in a room, where I can answer the question a module cannot answer. Whether that is worth more than per-seat speed is a judgement about the school. Before you sign either contract, the argument about translation compared with localisation belongs on the next leadership agenda.

Whichever way the decision goes, the same questions settle it faster than a demo does. Ask them of ChildSafeguarding.com, ask them of me, and write both sets of answers down before anyone talks about price.

• Which of your courses is published in the language my staff read, and at which tier: support staff, teacher, or leadership?
• Who in my school is named inside the course as the person staff must tell, and what happens to that name when the postholder changes in January?
• When my child protection policy is republished in June, what changes in the training, and who decides?
• Does the certificate record the policy version the training was built from, and who countersigned it?
• Can I see what a member of staff answered, or only that they reached the end?
• What does year three cost at my projected headcount, including the administrative hours spent chasing completions?
• Which adults on my site does this purchase leave untrained, and what is my plan for them?

Most schools do not have to choose one supplier. A per-learner course covers the adults who need recognition and a certificate, and it covers them faster and cheaper than any visit. A live day plus an audit reaches the adults who have to make judgement calls, and it deals with the part of the work that is specific to your documents and your host country. Where the line falls depends on how many of your staff carry that judgement and how far your policy has already been written down.

If your teachers work in Russian and your training does not, or you are weighing a per-learner licence against a whole-school engagement, book a 20-minute walkthrough and bring your current child protection policy. Twenty minutes with the policy open on screen will show you which of these two purchases your school needs first.