KCSIE 2025 Draft Guidance – What’s changing?

Posted 2 days ago

KCSIE 2024 Draft Guidance - What’s changing?

As we are getting closer to summer break, now is the perfect time for education staff to get familiar with the proposed changes to the 2025 KCSIE document, which was released in July.

Here at iHasco, clients working in the education sector get free access to our KCSIE Guidance course, which provides schools and colleges with a simple and effective way to distribute the guidance, as well as tracking who has read it.

We’ve recently published our Keeping Children Safe in Education – 2025 (Draft Guidance) course. This course will run alongside our existing KCSIE 2024 Guidance course until the end of August whilst we wait for the official guidance to be announced in September.

Key changes at a glance

It’s important to note that these updates are currently in draft form, and they may change between now and September. Additionally, the changes detailed below pertain only to Part One, Annex A, and Annex B (information for all school and college staff), as this is all we cover in our course.

While there has been no major additions to Part 1 of the guidance, the planned changes are more about bolstering and clarification of existing messages with more detail:

‘Preventing radicalisation’ disclaimer has been removed as the review of the content has been complete
Annex B has had two links added into its ‘Additional advice and support’ section
CSA Centre: Resources for education settings | CSA Centre
The Children’s Society: Preventing Child Sexual Exploitation | The Children’s Society

We have further detailed below the planned changes made to Part 2 of the guidance:

A disclaimer has been added to ‘Opportunities to teach safeguarding’ outlining a revision is likely to be published on Relationships, Sex, and Health and Education
The ‘content’ section under ‘Online Safety’ has been updated to include information on misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Two links, ‘Plan technology for your school – GOV.UK’ and ‘Generative AI: product safety expectations – GOV.UK’ has been added under ‘Filtering and monitoring’
Under ‘Information security and access management’, the wording was amended in the cybersecurity standards to highlight its development for improved cyber resilience
Guidance was added under ‘Alternative provision’ to highlight checks that should be taken by schools to ensure safer recruitment and children’s location during school hours.
The wording under ‘Children who are absent from education’ has been updated from ‘should work with’ to must work with’ to more accurately reflect the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ statutory guidance.
The wording under ‘Virtual School Heads’ has been amended to highlight the role and extended responsibilities of the virtual school head
A disclaimer has been added under ‘Children who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or gender questioning’ outlining a revised guidance expected to be published. ‘Spectrum’ and ‘disorder’ have also been removed under this section to align with SEND code of practice