Safeguarding training for non-teaching staff in schools

A student who will not speak to a form tutor will sometimes speak to the woman who serves lunch. Children talk on the bus, in the corridor between lessons, in the queue at the canteen, and in the nurse's room when they have asked to lie down for the third time in a week. The adults standing in those places are drivers, security staff, catering staff, cleaners, nurses and administrators, and in most international schools they receive the least safeguarding training and rarely receive it in their own language. Safeguarding training for non-teaching staff usually arrives, if it arrives at all, as the teachers' module with a translated cover sheet.

The frameworks most international schools work to expect otherwise. Keeping children safe in education, the Department for Education statutory guidance for schools in England, requires all staff to read part one in full, and the 2026 version came into force on 1 September 2026. The International Task Force on Child Protection, convened by ICMEC and the Council of International Schools, publishes expectations for schools that cover recruitment, governance and the handling of allegations across a school's whole adult community rather than its teaching staff alone.

The gap is usually not a decision anyone made. It is a scheduling accident. Induction week is built around the teaching timetable, the training is written in English by people who work in English, and the drivers are on the road when the session runs. Nobody signs off on excluding them. They are simply never in the room.

The core is short and identical for every adult on site. A member of the catering team needs four things: the name and face of the Designated Safeguarding Lead, the fact that a concern goes to that person and not to a line manager, the first move when a child says something (listen, make no promise of secrecy, write it down, walk it to the DSL that day), and the clauses of the code of conduct that touch their own work. Delivered properly, that is fifteen minutes.

What changes by role is the situation, not the route. The training becomes useful when the scenarios come from the place the person actually works.

• Drivers: a child left alone at a stop, a child who does not want to go home, behaviour between students on the back seats, and the rule about never being alone in a vehicle with one student.
• Security and reception: an adult at the gate who says they are a parent, an unaccompanied visitor inside the building, a student leaving during the school day, and the visitor and contractor sign-in they are responsible for.
• Catering: what a child eating nothing for a fortnight might mean, what a child asking to take food home might mean, and who to tell without questioning the child.
• Nurses and clinic staff: repeated attendance with vague symptoms, an injury with an explanation that does not fit it, a student who asks them to keep a secret, and the boundary between a medical record and a safeguarding record.
• Cleaners and site staff: what they see in empty classrooms and toilets, graffiti and messages left on walls, and who to hand it to.
• Administrators and finance staff: unexplained absence patterns, a parent contact record that keeps changing, and the confidentiality expected of anyone who sees a safeguarding file in passing.

None of those scenarios ask the member of staff to assess anything. Every one of them ends in the same place, which is the DSL, and that single ending is what keeps the training short enough to be worth running for a group that is paid by the hour.

A two-hour module written for teachers will not survive contact with a catering shift. The sessions that work run for fifteen or twenty minutes, at a time the group is already on site, in the space they work in: a driver briefing in the bus bay before the afternoon route, a kitchen session at the changeover between service and clean-down. Sessions held where people work tend to produce more questions than the same content delivered in a hall.

Concrete beats comprehensive with this audience for a practical reason. A member of the security team has no professional frame for the word disclosure and a very clear frame for the sentence, a man at the gate says he is here to collect a child and the name is not on the list. Write the training in the second register and the abstraction takes care of itself. Reading level matters as well: some of these staff read the local language fluently and English slowly, and some read either one slowly. Short sentences, named people and one action per step make the difference between a session that changes behaviour and a session that fills a register.

A school that runs its safeguarding training in English and hands non-teaching staff a translated PDF has done the visible half of the work. The reporting route contains terms that carry weight in the local legal system, and a literal translation can move the meaning of a duty. In Kazakhstan, the school terms for a concern, a report and a formal notification do not line up neatly across Kazakh, Russian and English, and the DSL needs that mapping agreed before a session rather than argued about during one.

The practical arrangement is a glossary agreed between the DSL and a senior colleague who works in the local language, used consistently across the policy, the training and the concern form, with the two of them delivering the session together. Staff then ask their questions in the language they think in, which is when the useful questions appear. Safeguarding training in the languages your staff speak covers the difference between translating a module and localising it.

Contracted staff complicate this further. Cleaning, catering, transport and security are often supplied by an outside company whose employees change without notice, and the school holds no training record for them at all. Safeguarding with visitors, contractors and volunteers on campus deals with the contractual side. The training side is simpler than it looks, because the fifteen-minute core is the same session, run on the day a new person starts on site.

When a CIS or COBIS evaluator asks to see training records, the sample they draw is rarely the teaching staff. They ask for the bus drivers, the security roster and the kitchen. A school that can produce a dated record for every adult on site, with the language of delivery and the policy version behind the content, has answered the question. A school that produces a teachers' completion report and an apology has answered a different one.

The record has to cover people the HR system does not always hold: contracted staff, the swimming coach who comes in twice a week, the maintenance team, and drivers employed by a transport company. A single list of every adult who is on site during the school day, reconciled once a term against the gate log and the contractor register, is the least a school needs before it can say that all staff are trained. Safeguarding training records that inspectors and evaluators ask to see covers what belongs in each entry.

Two fields cause most of the trouble in these records. The first is the language of delivery, which schools rarely capture, and which an evaluator will ask about the moment they see a Russian-speaking driver holding an English certificate. The second is the policy version, because an entry reading safeguarding training completed on 14 March says nothing about what the person was actually told. Both fields cost nothing to add and they turn a register into evidence.

Building that list is often the most revealing part of the exercise. A Head who asks for it tends to discover adults who are on the campus every day and were never counted as staff by anyone, and the count itself changes how the school schedules the next round of training.

SafeguardIS builds training from the school's own safeguarding and child protection policies, and role-specific modules for drivers, security, catering and clinic staff are drawn from those same documents, so the route a driver learns is the route the policy sets out. The Designated Safeguarding Lead reviews and approves every module before staff see it. Publishing requires a named reviewer's declaration, and the content is hashed and logged. Certificates are countersigned by the Head of School and the DSL and carry a code anyone can check on a public verification page, which matters when the person holding the certificate is employed by a transport contractor rather than by the school.

The platform ships training 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 ask the AI policy assistant questions that are answered from the school's own policies, in those languages, which suits a driver or a receptionist who would rather check a rule than ask a manager. 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 your last training report covered the teaching staff and stopped there, book a 20-minute walkthrough and bring the list of everyone else who is on site during the school day.