CIS International Safeguarding Development Programme alternatives

The Council of International Schools publishes the terms of its International Safeguarding Development Programme on its own site. In this market that is rare. The programme is described as giving the people who lead child protection and safeguarding at their school the chance to learn effective practices through professional development, and then to use an online developmental toolkit to monitor safeguarding activities. The page states an annual subscription fee of 1,050 euros, and that fee covers eight training sessions for one school member together with unlimited use of the toolkit inside the school. It also states that the programme is a subscription service available to all CIS member schools. A non-member should read that sentence first.

The eight sessions are described as expert led, including case study consultation and a suite of online learning activities. The toolkit carries risk assessments and safety plans, guidance briefings, policy templates and a wider resource library. Ask most safeguarding vendors for a price and the offer comes back without a boundary drawn around it. That boundary is what makes an offer comparable at all.

This comparison is independent. SafeguardIS has no partnership with the Council of International Schools, no endorsement from it, and no accreditation from it or from anybody else. I have worked in international education since 2008, I am an IB and CIS evaluator and an IB workshop leader, and my last school role was CIS accreditation coordinator at Miras International School in Astana. I have sat on the school side of a CIS process, which is why I would rather describe what the programme does than rate it.

CIS runs a separate workshop line, and the current index opens with a Safeguarding and Child Protection Foundation Workshop on 29 and 30 September 2026. Below it sits a Deep Dive Course on International Safer Recruitment, listed across three dates in November 2026, together with Deep Dive workshops on Harm Between Students, Adult Conduct Concerns, Communications in Crisis, Managing Allegations, Online Harms and Technology, and Designing Safeguarding Training. CIS titles that recruitment item a course, not a workshop, and its three November dates are spread out instead of consecutive. That changes what a participant has to block out in a calendar. The listed dates carry through to May 2027, so a school planning a year of leadership development can book against a published calendar rather than waiting for a vendor to open a cohort.

The framing is squarely international. The page says the workshops address challenges facing international school communities as they strive to interpret various cultural attitudes, laws and actions in addressing forms of abuse. Few providers name that problem in writing, and a school working between a host country legal system and an English or American curriculum tradition will recognise it immediately.

The workshops index carries no fee and no delivery language. Neither absence tells a buyer anything except that the school should ask CIS and not assume. Titles and dates on that index move through the year, so check the live page rather than any summary of it, this one included.

The published fee covers eight training sessions for one school member and unlimited use of the toolkit in the school. The page names one school member and stops there, so a Head who wants the deputy DSL in the room as well should ask CIS what that costs rather than work from an assumption in either direction. Even if the deputy is in the room, the arithmetic does not change. A school with a hundred and forty adults on site has a hundred and forty people who need to know what a disclosure sounds like, what to write down, who to tell, and by when. A subscription whose published fee names one school member does not reach all of them.

That is a scoping fact, and CIS does not present the programme as anything else. Its page says the programme is for those leading child protection and safeguarding at their school, taken as a cohort with peers from other member schools, using a toolkit built to track progress. Whole-staff coverage is a different job. It repeats every August as new arrivals land, it has to reach the drivers and the kitchen team as well as the teachers, and the record it produces has to hold up in front of a visiting team two years later. I have written separately about what a CIS visit asks for on safeguarding and about training the staff who are not teachers.

Most schools I speak to have solved the first job, and the second is still open in the third week of term. You see it when a new teaching assistant asks who the designated safeguarding lead is and three people in the staff room give three different answers.

Safeguarding e-learning in Russian exists, and any comparison implying otherwise falls apart on the first click. ChildSafeguarding.com lists Russian and Kazakh among the languages on its own languages page, translated by mother tongue educators according to that page. A school that needs certificated awareness coverage for Russian-reading support staff can buy that today, per learner, without commissioning anything from anyone.

What I have not found, across the providers I have checked while writing this set of comparisons, is a teacher-level or designated safeguarding lead level course in Russian, or a live safeguarding workshop delivered in Russian in a school hall. The CIS workshops index names no delivery language, so a Russian-speaking pastoral team should ask about that before booking a place. The gap is one of depth. It explains how a school in Astana or Almaty can find an induction module for its cleaners and still have nothing to put in front of its Russian-speaking homeroom teachers. Translation compared with localisation covers why running an English module through a translation engine does not close that gap.

If your school is a CIS member and the constraint is that your safeguarding lead is professionally isolated, buy the subscription. The page describes a network of support built by taking the professional development alongside peers from other CIS member schools, across eight expert led sessions that include case study consultation. A lead who has never tested a threshold decision against someone doing the same job in another country is carrying that judgement alone, and no workshop day I run in your hall puts eight other safeguarding leads in the room with them.

The same holds if the school is inside or approaching an accreditation cycle. The toolkit's own feature list says it helps a school identify strengths and areas for development, create reviews to track progress, share summaries with school leadership and Board members, and prepare information and evidence for any accreditation process. A lead who is twelve months out from a team visit and has no system for tracking what has already been done will get more out of that than out of another training day. Nothing I sell substitutes for it, and I would not try to argue otherwise.

If the gap you have already named is safer recruitment, book the Deep Dive Course on International Safer Recruitment and stop comparing. It is dedicated to that one subject, it is written for the international sector rather than for one country's vetting regime, and it runs across three dates instead of one sitting. A school that has found gaps in how it chases references, checks employment history or contacts a previous employer needs that as its own piece of work, not as forty minutes inside a general training day.

Sometimes the honest answer is both. Send the safeguarding lead to CIS first, let the model and the vocabulary settle, and train the staff body afterwards against a policy that has been through that lens. Training a hundred and forty people against a policy the lead is about to rewrite spends staff time, the most expensive resource in the building, on material that will be out of date by Christmas.

SafeguardIS answers a different constraint. I run live safeguarding workshop days on the school's own site, for teachers, support staff and leadership as separate groups, in English and in Russian, with the scenarios built from that school's own policies rather than from a stock library. I fix the scope and the fee before the day is booked.

Alongside the workshops I run whole-school safeguarding audits: a policy-by-policy review against International Task Force for Child Protection guidance and the legislation the school works under. The audit ends in a written action plan, and the training maps to that guidance. The bodies that signed it do not endorse, accredit or affiliate with anything I sell, and I would rather say that plainly than let the mapping do work it has not earned.

The platform turns the school's own policy documents into training modules that the designated safeguarding lead approves before any member of staff sees them. It records completions as staff train, the Head of School and the designated safeguarding lead countersign each certificate, and every certificate carries a code anyone can check on a public verification page. Each engagement includes twelve months of platform access for every member of staff. Miras International School in Astana is the pilot school.

Six questions separate the two offers, and a school can get every answer in a single email.

• Is my school a CIS member today, given that the subscription is scoped to member schools?
• How many people does this fee train, and how many adults work on my site?
• Which of my staff cannot work comfortably in English, and what are they being offered in the language they read?
• When my child protection policy is republished in June, what happens to the training built from the old version?
• Does the certificate name the person who approved the content, and the policy version it came from?
• Who develops my safeguarding lead, and who trains everybody else? Those can be two different answers, and usually are.

If your school has already booked its lead onto the CIS sessions and nobody has decided what the rest of the staff body gets, that is the conversation I am useful in. Before anything else, check whether the child protection policy is strong enough to train from at all, because training generated from a weak policy teaches staff a procedure the school cannot actually run. That check is the audit, and it comes before any workshop day is scheduled.

Book a 20-minute walkthrough and bring your current child protection policy. If the honest outcome of that call is that CIS covers what you need this year, I will say so.