Tes Safeguarding and EduCare alternatives for international schools

Tes Safeguarding and EduCare are the same company selling through two routes to market, and the international catalogues those two routes advertise are close without matching. The Tes international page describes the package as tailored specifically for international schools, with unlimited access to over 40 courses, and states that staff, governors and volunteers will have full access to all the courses. EduCare's international education page describes its own version as thirty essential safeguarding and duty of care training courses. A school collecting a figure from each route is therefore reading two published scopes about ten titles apart. Whichever route you buy through, ask which courses this year's licence actually covers.

The relationship is not visible on the Tes international page, which never mentions EduCare or COBIS anywhere on it. The phrase powered by EduCare comes from the COBIS safeguarding page, and EduCare's own site carries Tes Safeguarding Training in its navigation. Both sources point the same way, and neither of them is the Tes page itself. Have that ready before a procurement officer asks where the claim came from.

The breadth of that catalogue is the point of the product, and it is real. Alongside the child protection titles the Tes international list carries Fire Safety in International Schools, First Aid Essentials in International Schools, Administration of Medication in Schools, Food Hygiene and Safety, Concussion Awareness, Moving and Handling, A Guide to International Data Protection: Education, Promoting SEND Inclusion for International Schools and Staff Wellbeing for International Schools. A business manager who signs one licence and closes six separate procurement conversations has done something sensible with a Tuesday. SafeguardIS does not attempt that breadth and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The flagship international title also has published specifics a governing board can read for itself. Child Protection for International Schools was developed in partnership with the Council of British International Schools, and the course page states it is developed and fully endorsed by experts at COBIS. That page lists five modules with multiple choice questionnaires, a 70 per cent pass mark, five CPD credits with a personalised downloadable certificate, a maximum duration of five hours, and optional narration of each module for accessibility. Very few vendors in this market publish that much detail before a sales call.

COBIS lists the product on its own safeguarding page, describing Tes Safeguarding, powered by EduCare, as providing unlimited, whole school access to a wide range of expert-written, CPD-certified online courses in safeguarding and duty of care, and stating that COBIS schools are eligible for a 5% discount on new subscriptions. For a school preparing for COBIS Patron's Accreditation or a British Schools Overseas inspection, that provenance has practical value. The inspector already recognises the brand, and the association the school belongs to has already put its name next to it.

The partnership shows in the content. One of the stated learning outcomes on the Child Protection for International Schools page is to understand radicalisation, extremism and the Prevent duty, a duty created by English law and carried into the course because British schools overseas are the schools it was written with. If your school follows an English curriculum, answers to a British inspectorate and describes its arrangements in the vocabulary of Keeping Children Safe in Education, that is the content you want in front of your staff. I have set out what those standards ask for in the COBIS and BSO safeguarding standards.

A large or multi-campus international school whose staff all work in English, and which needs one annual number covering far more than safeguarding, should buy the licence. Thirty to forty courses spanning safeguarding, health and safety, compliance and wellbeing, for every member of staff plus governors and volunteers, is a purchase that survives a finance committee without an argument. Nothing I sell replaces it, and I would not advise a school to rebuild that spread from scratch.

There are three situations where I would send a school to them rather than to me. The first is a British school overseas in the year before an inspection, where recognised provenance shortens a conversation I would otherwise have to start from first principles. The second is a school with no in-house safeguarding capacity that needs coverage by the end of the month. Self-serve e-learning begins the moment the invoice clears, while a live workshop needs a date in a calendar already full of exams and parent evenings. The third is a newly appointed safeguarding lead who has to put a defined curriculum, with a stated pass mark and a CPD credit count, in front of a board in the second week of the post, long before anybody has time to design something bespoke.

The course design also does more with the local problem than I expected. EduCare's international page states that the course uses scenarios for the learner to reflect on, thinking about actions that fit the policies for their own school, and that it will encourage the learner to consider the safeguarding and child protection support services available in their country. On the inclusion title, the same page says the learner will consider how local law affects the issue. A pre-built module cannot hold one school's reporting form, so writing that prompt into the scenario and asking the learner to supply the local answer is a sound piece of instructional design, and more than most fixed libraries attempt.

On price, the whole-school package carries no published figure. The Tes international page invites buyers to request a quote, and does so repeatedly, so the annual cost arrives after a conversation. The COBIS listing publishes no price and no quote request at all. Its entire passage on the product is two sentences covering whole-school access and the member discount. The single course is different. On the day I checked in September 2026, EduCare's own page for Child Protection for International Schools listed it at 35.99 pounds excluding VAT, bought online. That page states multi-user discounts are available and asks anyone buying for ten or more learners to contact EduCare for a tailored pricing package, so the discount is a conversation rather than a rate you can model in advance. The single-course figure is still more than most of this market publishes.

Language is where the two products diverge. The Tes international page offers selected child protection titles in Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish. EduCare's international education page names Spanish and Arabic bundles, and the Child Protection for International Schools course page states the course is also available in Spanish and Arabic. Those are deliberate localisation choices, pointed at the markets where their schools cluster, and for a school in Madrid, Dubai or Shanghai they are the right ones.

My market is the one those choices do not point at. SafeguardIS delivers live on-site safeguarding workshop days in English and in Russian, for teachers, support staff and leadership, with role-specific scenarios built from the school's own policies. Across the published catalogues I read while writing this, a Russian-language safeguarding course does exist at the support-staff awareness tier, and anyone telling you otherwise has not looked. What I could not find published anywhere was a teacher-level or designated safeguarding lead-level course in Russian, or live workshop delivery in Russian at all. That is a narrower claim than the one vendors usually make, and it is the one I can stand behind.

Translating a module and localising a procedure are separate pieces of work, and the second is the one that changes what a member of staff does when a child says something worrying at half past three. A translated module still names another country's referral route. I have written about that distinction in translation compared with localisation.

A library of pre-built courses gives a general answer, and a well-made one. The local half of safeguarding is where the shape of the training starts to matter: the name of the person a member of staff tells, the form they complete, the deadline the school has set, the host country's own reporting duties, and the threshold this particular school draws between a note and an allegation. EduCare's international page is candid about where that half sits. The module frames the question and the learner supplies the answer, because the vendor does not hold the school's documents.

That boundary moves with the school, not the vendor. A procedure lives in the school's own files, and it changes when the school republishes those files in June. SafeguardIS starts from the other end of the same problem. The platform turns a school's own safeguarding and child protection policy documents into approved training modules, so what staff are tested on is the procedure the school operates, named people and deadlines included. The platform 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.

Most international schools should run both layers rather than pick a side. A general course carries the shared foundations. A short school-specific layer supplies the procedure the general course cannot name. I have set out how to split the two, and how to stop paying twice for the same content, in generic e-learning compared with school-specific training.

Whichever way a school goes, the same questions separate a working arrangement from an expensive one. Ask them before a quote arrives, and write the answers down. The gaps are almost always visible that early.

• How many of my staff cannot read this course in the language it ships in, and what happens to those people?
• Where in the course is the name of the person my staff must tell, and the deadline for telling them?
• What happens to the content when my child protection policy is republished in June?
• Does the certificate record the policy version the training was built from, and who approved it?
• What does year three cost at my projected headcount, once administrative and DSL hours are counted?
• Which of these courses does my host country's law contradict, and who checked?

This is an independent comparison. I have no partnership, affiliation or endorsement arrangement with Tes, EduCare or COBIS. Their names and marks belong to them, and every fact above comes from their own public pages, read on 10 September 2026. Pages change, so check them yourself before you sign anything.

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 CIS accreditation coordinator at Miras International School in Astana, which is the pilot school for the platform. What I sell is fixed in scope: live on-site safeguarding workshop days for teachers, support staff and leadership in English and Russian, with role-specific scenarios built from the school's own policies. I also run a whole-school safeguarding audit that reviews the policies one by one against International Task Force for Child Protection guidance and the legislation the school works under, and ends in a written action plan. Twelve months of platform access for all staff comes with each engagement.

If you are weighing a licence renewal against building a layer of your own, book a 20-minute walkthrough and bring your current child protection policy. Twenty minutes with the actual document tells us both more than a feature comparison will.