Introduction
The reporting of concerns to the Designated Safeguarding Lead is the most frequently exercised safeguarding responsibility that falls to the majority of school staff. And it is, research and serious case reviews have repeatedly demonstrated, the responsibility most frequently exercised poorly. Not through bad faith, but through uncertainty about what is significant enough to report, hesitation about making a fuss over something that may turn out to be nothing and the daily pressures of professional life that make it easier to watch and wait than to act.
This article sets out what must be reported to the DSL, why the threshold for reporting is deliberately low, what constitutes poor safeguarding practice and how schools can build the culture in which reporting is confident, prompt and consistent.
What Staff Must Report Immediately
KCSIE 2025 and Working Together to Safeguard Children are clear about the categories of concern that must be reported to the DSL without delay. These include:
> • Any suspicion that a student is injured, marked or bruised in a way > that is not readily attributable to the normal knocks and scrapes > received in play, particularly where the injury is in an unusual > location or the child's explanation is inconsistent or unconvincing > > • Any explanation given by a child or parent that appears inconsistent > with the visible injury, concerning behaviour or change in > presentation > > • Any behaviours that give rise to concern that a student may have > suffered harm, including worrying drawings, writings, play or verbal > expressions > > • Any concern that a student may be suffering from inadequate care, > ill-treatment or emotional maltreatment, including patterns of poor > presentation, apparent hunger, chronic fatigue or emotional > dysregulation that cannot be otherwise explained > > • Any concerns that a student is presenting signs or symptoms of abuse > or neglect > > • Any significant changes in a student's presentation, including > unexplained deterioration in academic engagement, attendance, personal > presentation or social behaviour > > • Any hint or direct disclosure of abuse from any person, whether > child or adult, whether relating to the child themselves or to another > child > > • Any concern regarding a person who may pose a risk to children, > including concerns arising from information about an adult in the > child's household
The Low Threshold: Why It Matters
The threshold for reporting to the DSL is deliberately, and appropriately, lower than the threshold for referral to children's social care. This distinction is crucial and often misunderstood. Staff do not need to be certain that a child is being harmed in order to report a concern. They do not need to have evidence. They do not need to have conducted any form of investigation. They need only to be concerned: to have noticed something that does not quite fit, that nags at professional instinct, that would keep them awake at night if they did not raise it.
The decision about whether a concern meets the threshold for referral to children's social care, police or other agencies is the DSL's decision, made with the benefit of the full picture of the school's safeguarding records for that child, knowledge of local thresholds and procedures and, where necessary, advice from children's social care. It is not the classroom teacher's decision. The classroom teacher's decision is simply whether to report to the DSL, and the answer to that question should almost always be yes.
> If in doubt, report. The purpose of the DSL is precisely to exercise > the professional judgement that individual staff members are not > expected to exercise alone. A concern that turns out to be nothing has > cost nothing. A concern that is not reported may cost everything.
The Pattern Problem: Cumulative Harm and Single-Incident Thinking
One of the most consistently identified failures in serious case reviews is the professional tendency to evaluate each concern in isolation rather than recognising it as part of an accumulating pattern. A child who arrives at school hungry on one occasion is not necessarily cause for concern. A child who arrives at school hungry twice a week for three months, in combination with chronic fatigue, missed medical appointments and repeated unexplained absences, is presenting a very different picture.
The DSL can only see and respond to patterns if staff are recording and reporting concerns consistently. A single concern not reported because it did not seem serious enough is a gap in the record that may make the pattern invisible. Staff who understand this are not just fulfilling a procedural obligation when they report; they are contributing to a cumulative intelligence about a child's welfare that may, at some future point, be the difference between early intervention and a serious case review.
Poor Safeguarding Practice: What the Evidence Shows
Working Together to Safeguard Children and the body of learning from serious case reviews across England identify a consistent set of poor safeguarding practices that have contributed to children suffering harm that might have been prevented. These include:
> • Failing to act on and refer early signs of abuse and neglect, either > because they were not recognised as significant or because staff were > uncertain about whether to report > > • Poor record keeping: records that are incomplete, insufficiently > detailed, imprecisely worded or stored insecurely > > • Failing to listen to the views of the child: treating children's > accounts as unreliable, discounting their expressions of distress or > failing to seek their perspective on their own situation > > • Failing to reassess concerns when situations do not improve: > treating a single response to a concern as sufficient rather than > continuing to monitor and review > > • Not sharing information with the right people within and between > agencies: the failure to ensure that information relevant to a > child's safety reaches those who need it in a timely way > > • Sharing information too slowly: the delay in passing on concerns > that allows harm to continue or escalate > > • A lack of challenge to those who appear not to be taking action: the > failure to hold agencies, colleagues or other professionals to account > when their response to a safeguarding concern appears inadequate
The frequency with which these same failures appear across decades of serious case review findings is both sobering and instructive. These are not unusual or exceptional failures. They are the predictable results of professional cultures where reporting is not normalised, where recording is treated as an administrative chore and where the professional courage required to challenge inadequate responses is not developed and supported.
Building a Culture of Confident Reporting
The solution to these failures is cultural as well as procedural. Schools need reporting systems that are clear, accessible and easy to use. They need training that gives staff genuine confidence in recognising and recording concerns. They need DSLs who respond to concerns in ways that make staff feel their referral was appropriate and valued, regardless of whether it resulted in further action. And they need leadership that communicates, consistently and explicitly, that raising a concern is always the right thing to do.
Staff who have previously raised concerns and been made to feel that they were wrong to do so, or who have been criticised for raising concerns that did not turn out to be substantiated, are significantly less likely to report in future. The institutional response to every safeguarding report, not just the ones that prove significant, shapes the culture of reporting for the entire staff body.
The Self-Protecting Professional
There is also a dimension of professional self-protection in the reporting obligation that staff should understand. A member of staff who has noticed a concern and does not report it is professionally exposed if that concern later proves to be evidence of harm. The documentation of every concern reported to the DSL, and the DSL's record of decisions and reasoning, protects staff as well as children.
Conversely, a culture in which staff routinely underreport because of the workload implications, the discomfort of raising concerns about children whose families they know, or the professional risk of appearing to overreact, is a culture in which both children and staff are inadequately protected. The reporting obligation is not a burden; it is a professional safeguard.
After Reporting: What Staff Should Expect
Staff who report concerns to the DSL are entitled to know, at a minimum, that their concern has been received, that it has been taken seriously and what, broadly, the outcome of the DSL's assessment was. They are not entitled to detailed information about subsequent investigations, referrals or multi-agency decisions, which are subject to confidentiality requirements. But they are entitled to continue to support the child appropriately and to raise further concerns if new information emerges or the situation does not improve.
If a member of staff has reported a concern to the DSL and believes that no action has been taken, or that the response was inadequate, KCSIE is explicit that they retain the right and the responsibility to refer their concern directly to children's social care. The reporting hierarchy exists to support effective safeguarding, not to prevent it.
Conclusion
Reporting to the DSL is the most basic and the most frequently exercised safeguarding act that most school staff will perform. Done consistently, promptly and with sufficient detail, it is among the most powerful child protection tools in the school's arsenal. Done hesitantly, selectively or not at all, it is a gap in the system through which children fall.
The culture of confident, prompt and consistent reporting does not build itself. It is built by leadership that takes safeguarding seriously, by training that genuinely equips staff for their responsibilities, by DSLs who are accessible and affirming and by institutions that treat every concern, however small, with the seriousness it deserves.
Children cannot report on their own behalf. School staff can. That is a responsibility which, understood and exercised well, is one of the most important professional acts any educator performs.
References: KCSIE 2025 | Working Together to Safeguard Children | Children Act 1989 and 2004 | DfE Research Report DFE-RB192 | House of Commons Library, Safeguarding in English Schools (2024)