The Safeguarding Alliance alternatives for international schools

The Safeguarding Alliance is a UK safeguarding organisation, and its own navigation lists five services: training, consultancy, membership, audits and a school safeguarding curriculum, alongside its research. Education is one of nine sectors it names, sitting next to health, housing, sport, the military, and travel and tourism, so a school buying from them is buying from a cross-sector safeguarding practice rather than a schools-only vendor. It publishes a UK telephone number and a UAE number side by side. For an international school the training matters most, because the association route puts it in front of a designated safeguarding lead who is already looking.

Three of the four courses listed on the COBIS safeguarding page are delivered by The Safeguarding Alliance: the advanced Level 3 course for designated safeguarding leads, safer recruitment for international schools, and safeguarding for governors and trustees. The fourth listing on that page is Tes Safeguarding Online Programmes, powered by EduCare, so the association names more than one provider and a head comparing the two can see both in the same place. The Safeguarding Alliance also sits inside the British International Schools Safeguarding Coalition, which its page describes as a collaboration bringing together the six UK Government supported and approved British international school associations and The Safeguarding Alliance. Those six are COBIS, FOBISIA, NABSS, BSME, AoBSO and LAHC. A designated safeguarding lead at a member school meets this provider through the association rather than through a search engine.

Their training page also publishes what most vendors in this market keep behind a quote form. Nine courses are listed, from a three-hour Level 2 session to a five and a half hour designated safeguarding lead course. Each one carries a stated duration, a price, and the delivery options, which run from online to face to face to bespoke. The COBIS booking page for the Level 3 international course publishes a fee as well, although it shows more than one figure and the VAT treatment changes depending on whether the school or the individual pays and where the payer is based. Read that page directly rather than take a number from me, because a number quoted second hand about somebody else's business ages badly.

The Level 3 course runs 5.5 hours across three live online sessions on published dates, and the COBIS page states plainly that recordings and slides will not be made available, with certificates issued to attendees. That is a normal condition for live training and a defensible one, since a live session is worth more when people talk in it. It also settles what the school owns afterwards. The delegate carries the learning back in their head, and getting it to every other adult in the building is the school's own work, done in its own languages and from its own policy.

Language is the second place the two offers separate. Their published course pages name no delivery language, and every page I read was written and sold in English. For a British international school where every adult works in English, that is a fit. For a school where the drivers read Russian and the kitchen staff read Kazakh, the translation and the delivery both move onto the DSL. Safeguarding e-learning in Russian does exist. ChildSafeguarding.com lists Russian and Kazakh among the languages on its own languages page, and other providers offer it too. What I could not buy anywhere when I went looking for my own school was a live safeguarding workshop day delivered in Russian to a whole staff body, which is why I ended up running them.

The third difference is where the content comes from. Their courses run to a published, fixed set of learning outcomes. The COBIS booking page for the Level 3 course states that the unit has seven, covering national and international legislative frameworks, responding to evidence that a child has been abused or harmed, the referral process, record keeping, levels of safeguarding and security clearance, risk assessment in an international setting, and safe and healthy living. The same page names who the qualification is aimed at, from head teachers to health and safety officers. That fixity is what makes a Level 3 certificate mean the same thing in Muscat as it does in Madrid. SafeguardIS builds the training from the school's own safeguarding and child protection policies, so what staff practise is the reporting route that school actually operates, with the DSL named, the form named and the deadline stated. Those are two different jobs. A published set of outcomes certifies a person against a recognised standard. Policy-derived training gets one specific building to act one specific way.

If your school belongs to COBIS and your constraint is that the DSL and the deputy need advanced certification on a date you can put in the calendar, book them and stop reading this. The COBIS page publishes course dates across the coming academic year, the sessions are delivered by the provider the association itself names, and the certificate carries a provenance an inspector recognises without needing it explained. Nothing I sell replaces that, and I would not try to talk a school out of it. The same applies to their safer recruitment and governor courses. A governing body can complete those without commissioning anything larger, and they cover the ground I write about in safer recruitment in international schools.

Their audit is also a genuine product with a modular method. Their own page describes a desktop policy review, meetings with key stakeholders and an on-site in-depth review, across eight named focus areas: governance and leadership, policies and procedures, reporting and referring, risk assessments and risk registers, safer recruitment, case management, premises and security, and safeguarding culture. The full package is broken into six stages and ends in a report and a one-year support and membership package. A school that wants a deep dive into one area rather than the whole organisation can buy a focussed audit instead, described as a one to two-day assessment with a short report. Their page also states, twice, that the audit rests on the evidence presented at the time and is not an endorsement or accreditation of practice, which is the kind of sentence I trust a vendor more for writing than less.

A school preparing for a British Schools Overseas inspection, whose staff all work in English, which wants a UK-standards external review with a year of support behind it and two people certificated to Level 3, should buy from The Safeguarding Alliance. That school is not my customer and telling it otherwise would waste its budget. If you are working out what a British Schools Overseas inspection actually asks for, that answer holds.

I sell three things and they arrive together. The first is a live on-site workshop day for teachers, support staff and leadership, delivered in English and Russian, with role-specific scenarios written from that school's own policies, so the bus driver and the head of secondary work through situations from their own corridors rather than a case study set in Surrey. 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 actually works under, ending in a written action plan. Both engagements are fixed scope and fixed fee. The ITFCP material is guidance the review maps to, and the bodies behind it do not endorse, accredit or affiliate with what I do.

The third is the platform, and twelve months of access for every member of staff is included with either engagement. It turns the school's own policy documents into training modules, which the designated safeguarding lead reviews and approves before any member of staff sees them. The platform records completions as staff train. Certificates are countersigned by the Head of School and the designated safeguarding lead and carry a code anyone can check on a public verification page, which matters the day a teaching assistant moves to another school and the receiving DSL wants to know what was covered rather than that a box was ticked.

That structure answers a different question from certification. After a Level 3 course, one person in the building holds the learning and the school still has to move it. After a workshop day and a year of platform access, the record shows which of your staff completed which module, built from which version of which policy, approved by whom and on what date. The role of the designated safeguarding lead changes shape once the cascade stops being their personal project. If you are assembling safeguarding evidence for an accreditation visit, that is the difference between a certificate for the DSL and a register you can hand across the table.

Both routes are defensible purchases. These questions separate them faster than a comparison table, and they work equally well pointed at me. Write the answers down before anything is signed.

• After this training, how many adults in my building will have been trained, and how many will have been told about it by somebody who attended?
• How many of my staff cannot follow the session in the language it runs in, and what is my plan for those people?
• Does the material name my DSL, my form and my deadline, or does it name the principle and leave me the procedure?
• What do I hold afterwards: a certificate, a report, a record per person, or slides I can reuse next September?
• What happens to the content when my child protection policy is republished in June?
• Who approved this content for my school, by name, and on what date?

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. I am not a designated safeguarding lead, and the reason I built this the way I did is that I sat on the accreditation side of the problem and watched standard modules written for another jurisdiction get completed by staff who could not read them properly. Pilot school: Miras International School, Astana. SafeguardIS is not accredited or certified by any body, and I would rather write that here than have you find it out later.

This comparison is mine alone. I have no partnership, affiliation, endorsement or commercial agreement with The Safeguarding Alliance or with COBIS, and I have used no logo or mark of theirs. Every statement above about their offer comes from their own pages and the COBIS pages, all of which are linked below, and I checked each one on 10 September 2026 rather than take it from a research summary. Their offer will change, and when it does this page will be wrong until I update it.

If your staff work in more than one language and your last training round produced completions you would struggle to defend in an inspection, the practical starting point is your policy rather than a course. It is also worth reading how translation differs from localisation before you commission either. Book a 20-minute walkthrough and bring your current child protection policy, and I will tell you plainly whether a workshop day, an audit or a per-delegate course from somebody else is the right next purchase.