Implementing a whole school approach to child sexual abuse

Child sexual abuse affects more children than many of us realise. Analysis by the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre) indicates that around one in 10 children experience some form of sexual abuse before they turn 16. Girls are three times as likely than boys to be abused, though boys are also at significant risk. Most children who are sexually abused will not tell anyone at the time, and many never tell anyone at all.

This is not because children do not want our help. Research consistently shows that children face significant barriers to telling such as fear, shame, confusion, loyalty to the person harming them, or simply not having the words or understanding to describe what is happening. Some survivors recall trying to tell someone, but their attempts were not understood, or the signs were noticed but attributed to something else entirely.

In education, a ‘whole-school approach’ offers a way to tackle complex issues by involving the whole community in working together to build and embed processes and strategies that provide a sustainable and holistic response to issues such as health and wellbeing, behaviour and learning. Applied to child sexual abuse, this approach can ensure that all professionals in your education setting have the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to talk to children when they have concerns, and that those concerns will be responded to consistently. This includes sexual abuse and harmful sexual behaviour with an online element.

The evidence tells us that, when education settings respond well and staff feel equipped to notice concerns and speak to children about them, the effect can be transformative. Children who are listened to and believed are more likely to access support, and more likely to begin recovering from the harm that has happened to them.

This framework is for anyone working in an education setting who has additional safeguarding responsibilities, including those who deliver and review safeguarding improvement activities. Whether you are a designated safeguarding lead/professional,[1] a staff professional development coordinator, part of a leadership team, or a governor or trustee, the framework provides evidence-based resources and learning to:

• help you review how well your education setting understands, prevents and responds to all forms of child sexual abuse
• support your improvement activity.

As an education leader, you are in a unique position. You and your colleagues see children every day, often over many years. You notice when something changes. You build relationships that can become the foundation for a child to feel safe enough to seek help. And when abuse does become known, your response can shape whether that child’s experience is one of being believed and supported, or of being dismissed and silenced.

Even thinking about children you know being sexually abused, or displaying harmful sexual behaviour themselves, can be difficult – and taking action can feel even more daunting. But you are not alone. You already have the skills to be able to recognise, support and safeguard a sexually abused child, and keep them and other children safe. What this framework offers is a structure to build on what you already do well, with specific knowledge about child sexual abuse that will help you and your colleagues respond with greater confidence.

The framework for a whole-school approach to child sexual abuse was developed by the CSA Centre in partnership with a range of education settings across England and Wales, in two waves during the academic years 2023/24 and 2025/26. Education settings that have piloted the framework include primary and secondary schools (some of which also have early years provision) in both the state and independent sectors, and a pupil referral unit.

Leaders in each of these pilot settings undertook an audit, designed to help them think about their practice in relation to child sexual abuse. Once their audits were complete, the pilot settings were supported to develop improvement plans to address the audit findings. They determined their own improvement activities, supported by research-informed training and practice resources developed by the CSA Centre.

Throughout the pilots, the CSA Centre’s research and evaluation team tracked the progress made by the participating settings, identifying the enablers and barriers that emerged. This allowed us to learn alongside the pilot settings, and helped shape and strengthen the final framework. Learning from the first wave of pilots in 2023/24 informed the second wave, which is still ongoing at the time of publication; learning from the second wave will be incorporated into future editions of this resource.

For the sake of simplicity, in this resource we generally use the term ‘child’ to mean anyone under the age of 18. It is important to remember that teenagers as well as younger children can be subjected to child sexual abuse.

We use the term ‘parent’ to encompass any parent/carer of a child, including a biological parent, step-parent, adoptive parent, foster parent or any other relative (such as a grandparent) who is the child’s main caregiver.

We use ‘setting’ to refer to a child’s place of learning; the term covers early years provision, primary and secondary schools (including residential schools), special schools, post-16 provision, pupil referral units, etc.

The framework for implementing a whole-school approach to child sexual abuse consists of four broad stages, which are reflected in the structure of this resource:

1. Prepare
2. Audit
3. Plan improvements
4. Deliver and embed

We have produced templates and guides to support you through each stage of the process, and to help you to respond to specific pupil groups.

Settings are encouraged to take a collaborative approach to each stage of the framework.

The audit of your setting is broken down into six areas of practice; these can be audited simultaneously, or individually over a longer time period if there are competing priorities for your setting at present.

We know that most children who have been sexually abused never receive any intervention from children’s social care or the police, either because the abuse is not recognised or because it is deemed not to meet the threshold for statutory intervention. This does not mean that the abuse hasn’t happened, or that they don’t need support. Rather than telling anyone verbally that they have been abused, some children will show signs that something is wrong, such as changes in behaviour, difficulties with attendance, or withdrawal from learning. Some others may instead completely immerse themselves in their education and over-perform.

Children need adults who are willing to be curious, to ask careful questions, and to take their concerns seriously, even when the child cannot yet put their experience into words. Doing this opens the door to support. It communicates to the child that they matter; that what is happening to them is not OK; that they are not alone; and, if they have been able to talk to you, that you believe them. For many children, this is where healing begins.

Confident, skilled staff are therefore essential, but how well your education setting identifies and responds to child sexual abuse also depends on its structures and systems that surround individual practice. These include:

• how policies are reviewed and implemented
• how concerns are recorded and reviewed
• how information is shared
• how your curriculum addresses relationships and safety
• how your culture supports children to trust the adults around them, and supports those adults to exercise their curiosity and discuss their concerns.

This framework will guide you through an audit of these broad elements, to help you identify where your systems strengthen practice and where they may inadvertently create gaps. You may find, for example, that your staff feel confident responding to disclosures but your recording practices make it difficult to spot patterns over time – or that your safeguarding policy is in place but is not well understood by all staff.

By taking this structured, whole-school approach, responsibility for responding to child sexual abuse moves beyond individual expertise and becomes embedded across your setting. When your structures, systems and culture align, children are more likely to be noticed, believed and supported regardless of which member of staff they happen to encounter.

The phrase ‘whole-school approach’ can sometimes create a misunderstanding that it means tackling issues without external input, but we know an effective whole-school safeguarding approach requires multi-agency working: social care, police, health services, and specialist support organisations all have critical roles to play. Nothing in this framework is intended to replace those partnerships, or to suggest that staff in a child’s education setting should become the sole responders to child sexual abuse.

However, the reality is that you have the most influence over what happens within your own setting. You can shape your culture, train your staff team, strengthen your curriculum, and improve how you respond when concerns arise. You have less control over what happens in other agencies, including their thresholds for involvement, their capacity, and their response times. By focusing on what you can influence, you can create a safer, more consistent environment for children, regardless of the challenges beyond your setting.

A whole-school approach provides a foundation that makes multi-agency working more effective: when education settings are consistent, well-trained and clear in their own responses, they are better placed to work alongside statutory agencies and other organisations to protect children.

All education settings have to comply with firmly established statutory duties to safeguard children, set out in statutory guidance such as the following:

For example, paragraph 79 of Keeping Children Safe in Education 2025 states:

“Governing bodies and proprietors should ensure that all governors and trustees receive appropriate safeguarding and child protection (including online) training at induction. This training should equip them with the knowledge to provide strategic challenge to test and assure themselves that the safeguarding policies and procedures in place in schools and colleges are effective and support the delivery of a robust whole school approach to safeguarding.”

However, while statutory guidance sets out clear expectations for safeguarding and recommends taking a whole-school approach, it is limited in the advice about how to embed the most promising practice.

This framework addresses that issue, guiding you and your setting through a comprehensive audit and improvement-planning process so you can pinpoint areas for improvement and successfully implement a whole-school approach to child sexual abuse.

In November 2024, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel published the findings from a national review, “I Wanted Them All to Notice”: Protecting Children and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse in the Family Environment. While the focus of the national review was child sexual abuse within the family, its findings and recommendations are applicable to all forms of child sexual abuse. The report stated:

“The findings of this national review clearly illustrate the scale of the challenge facing practitioners, and indeed wider society, in identifying, responding to and preventing child sexual abuse in the family environment. They highlight a systemic failure across all agencies to recognise and respond when children are at risk of, or are already, being sexually abused by someone in their family environment.”

Among the report’s recommendations were two that are especially relevant to the framework for a whole-school approach.

“Recommendation 2: Professional knowledge, skills and confidence. Government should take the necessary steps, working with professional bodies, to ensure that practitioners and managers have the necessary skills, knowledge and capabilities, including access to relevant guidance and multi‑agency training.”

“Recommendation 5: Talking to children. Government should ensure that practitioners understand that they can and should talk directly to children, and families, about concerns of sexual abuse.”

The framework gives your setting access to high-quality practice resources, information and guidance so your staff have the skills and knowledge specified in these recommendations.

The CSA Centre has produced a wide range of resources (detailed in our CSA Centre resources sheet) to support education professionals’ practice in relation to child sexual abuse – but using our framework to implement a whole-school approach will enable you to go beyond individual practice and ensure that your setting’s structures and systems are facilitating rather than hindering your response to that abuse. Please note that these are only examples of the differences that a whole-school approach to child sexual abuse can make.

All education settings must respond dynamically to changing safeguarding priorities. These can be influenced by many factors, including what you know about the risks to individual children or groups of children, or other factors and contexts which may increase the opportunities for harm to occur.

The media can also heavily influence the lens through which we see child sexual abuse, driving both national and local agendas. This can result in staff in your setting having a narrow focus on the type of harm and circumstances where they think child sexual abuse is most likely to happen. Additionally, they may find it difficult to accept that anyone would sexually abuse children, and especially certain groups such as very young children and disabled children.

To keep children safe, your staff should be considering all forms of child sexual abuse and know that this abuse can happen to any child – and that children themselves can engage in harmful sexual behaviour.

“The thought of telling anyone was just … It just didn’t even dawn on me. I mean I don’t even know what happened to me, I didn’t know this happened to boys – who would believe me?”[2]

By supporting you to audit staff knowledge and confidence across your setting, and to implement improvements, this framework can give you confidence that staff across your setting appreciate the scale and nature of child sexual abuse and understand the different contexts in which it takes place, including:

• child sexual abuse by adults in the family network (including neighbours and friends of the family)
• child sexual abuse by other trusted adults
• harmful sexual behaviour by siblings
• harmful sexual behaviour by other children or young people
• child sexual exploitation
• child sexual abuse and harmful sexual behaviour in online contexts; it is important to note, though, that digital technologies can feature in almost all forms of child sexual abuse.

“I think that sometimes people slip through the net, because they are very good at hiding, and they don’t always show what they really feel about things so I think, sometimes too many people get missed … Sometimes it’s right under people’s noses and they just don’t recognise it.”[3]

Research shows that children face many barriers to communicating about sexual abuse, so it is up to adults to notice the signs and indicators of possible sexual abuse and speak to children when they have concerns. This can include signs in the behaviour of the children themselves, and also in the behaviour of adults (whether within the child’s family/social network or in formal settings such as health or education, for example) who may be of concern; people who sexually abuse children are most often known to them, and education settings are not exempt from this reality.

With training and support, these signs and indicators can be better understood, and changes in a child’s well-being, engagement or behaviour can be explored as potential indicators of abuse. Without training, misconceptions can influence thinking and practice – staff may make assumptions about who is likely to offend, how prevalent sexual abuse is, or which children are most at risk. Any child can be sexually abused; this harm cuts across all socio-economic backgrounds, and those who offend are often known to the child, often within their immediate family or wider network.

“My college tutor … was absolutely amazing. He noticed something was wrong, I don’t know how because he didn’t really know me.”[4]

As well as enabling you to identify gaps in knowledge and confidence so you can arrange appropriate training around identifying signs and indicators, this framework can also help you to embed consistent practices so that individual colleagues’ concerns that a child is being or has been sexually abused can be combined to construct a fuller picture of what is going on.

“I never went and asked for help, but no one ever asked me if I needed help.”[5]

Many education practitioners will have received limited training or support to inform their practice around child sexual abuse, and may believe that talking to a child about sexual abuse is something that only a specialist can do.

However, it’s imperative to realise that a confident early response can prevent abuse from continuing or escalating. If a staff member has a concern about possible sexual abuse, it is often most appropriate for them to talk to the child about it themselves immediately– and in cases where a child feels able to approach a staff member and tell them about sexual abuse, that staff member will need to know what they should and should not do or say at that point. As paragraph 3.18 of Keeping Learners Safe says:

“Children will talk about their concerns and problems with people they feel they can trust and are comfortable with. This will not necessarily be a teacher or the [designated safeguarding professional], but could be any member of staff within the education setting. It is therefore essential that all staff and volunteers know how to respond sensitively to a child’s concerns, who to approach for advice, and the importance of not guaranteeing complete confidentiality.”

A whole-school approach can ensure that policies and procedures are clear, so that all staff know exactly what they should do in different circumstances – and recognise that they already have the skills they need to talk to a child about even such a sensitive subject.

“We’re still being a bit too reactive and not proactive enough so we’re not going on to CPOMS and putting in reports and saying what is our data telling us? We’re not analysing trends over time and looking at what is happening in the community.”[6]

The CSA Centre’s Key Messages from Research on Children and Young People Who Display Harmful Sexual Behaviour highlights that harmful sexual behaviour is more common than is widely thought, and is often an indicator of other issues:

“There are no accurate prevalence figures on the full spectrum of harmful sexual behaviours. However, available data suggests that under-18s are responsible for a significant proportion of child sexual abuse, and there is considerable concern about widespread and ‘normalised’ sexual harassment and abuse between students in schools. … Most pre-adolescent children displaying harmful sexual behaviour have themselves been sexually abused or experienced other kinds of trauma or neglect.”

If incidents of harmful sexual behaviour occur involving children in your setting, there are many challenges to ensure that your response is proportionate and fair – especially if you are managing conflicting expectations from the children involved, their parents, and other people in their network – each of whom may hold a very different view about how the incident(s) should be responded to. This can be further complicated by factors relating to the ages of the children, when and where the incident(s) took place, who was involved, whether there was an online element and/or images were involved, and misinformation on social media.

This framework supports your setting to consider the factors that inform your response to incidents of harmful sexual behaviour, and to focus on consistency in the recording and reporting of concerns and incidents. Consistent data recording, followed by analysis, can help you to:

• plan improved responses and interventions
• review your curriculum offer
• review your policies and practice
• plan support and training for your staff
• engage with specialist support.

Recording reliable data can also improve information sharing with other professionals, including your local or regional safeguarding partnership, potentially helping to identify trends and develop a broader system response.

[1] The role is ‘designated safeguarding lead’ in England and ‘designated safeguarding professional’ in Wales.

[2] Interviewee in the study The Voices of Male Survivors: The Lived Experiences of Adult Male Victims of Child Sexual Abuse. (Azzaro, 2019; University of Pennsylvania).

[3] Interviewee in the study Child Sexual Exploitation in South-East Wales: Problems and Solutions from the Perspectives of Young People and Professionals (Hallett, 2013; University of Cardiff).

[4] Interviewee in the study Making Noise: Children’s Voices for Positive Change after Sexual Abuse. Children’s Experiences of Help-seeking and Support after Sexual Abuse in the Family Environment (Warrington et al, 2017; University of Bedfordshire).

[5] Interviewee in the study No One Noticed, No One Heard: A Study of Disclosures of Childhood Abuse (Allnock and Miller, 2013; NSPCC).

[6] Project leader in one of the schools that piloted the whole-school approach.