Statutory safeguarding guidelines updated for sept 2026

[WarriorN]

I’ve just had an alert - looks like new guidance is out.

I’ve not looked properly yet though.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education--2

I was referring to the draft guidance on gender questioning children (from the previous government) that was lengthy and addressed a whole host of issues that schools have been struggling with, including addressing the fact that children shouldn't be compelled into getting involved with socially transitioning peers (that's a summary, not a direct quote).

Sorry for not making that clear.

Well, that's so much clearer! Why couldn't they have said that?

Yes. I've not gone thought the technical guidance yet - the consultation closes on Sept 30th.

I know that this is generally in the right direction. I'm sorry that the govt bottled addressing the detailed draft guidance on gender questioning children as it did go into considerable detail and addressed many practical issues that schools struggle with, which this doesn't.

But, along with the new RSHE guidlines we're a lot further in removing age inappropriate transactivism from schools and it's great that this issue is unashamedly part of safeguarding practice.

Definition are a bit of a minefield.
Generally accepted:
Toilet facilities
Sanitary accommodation that
contains water-closets (WCs) and/or urinals, along with washbasins and hand-drying facilities.

Conveniences means toilets. Facilities includes washbasin. In the toilets section points they mention facilities.

The room definition is more problematical. I believe in the spirit of standards it should be that cubicles are within rooms, even if it’s full height. It’s a bit like saying a fitted wardrobe is a room.

There’s also a problem with ‘lockable’ as that suggests you can’t open it. All toilets have to be opened easily from outside for safety reasons.

Surely for safety reasons (particularly in a school) they have to not be easily opened from outside.

It’s for safety reasons because of people collapsing inside the cubicle. You should make sure enough staff know how to open the doors at school. The manufacturer that supplied the school may need to be contacted if unsure. In Wales, Scotland and England they have all have this in regulations for years for non domestic toilets.
I don’t often talk about it for obvious reasons about misuse. (That’s another reason why a floor to door gap is important as you have advance notice of who is by your door).

There have been recent deaths in school toilets where teachers have tried cpr but it’s not been successful. In cases there have been delays. For a quick rescue you need to know they have collapsed in the first place and get in quickly. Because people tend to collapse onto the door, toilet doors should also be able to open outwards or be taken off the hinges. Again, this design feature is all in regs. Here’s the DfE wording from 2022:
‘Inward opening doors shall be able to open outwards through use of an emergency releasable door hinge or a lift-off facility to facilitate emergency assistance to someone who has fallen against the door inside the cubicle (blocking the door from opening).’

The new design guidance for the DfE talks about special shaped Allen keys - I think this is daft unless there’s an easily accessible set kept near each floor of toilets and enough staff are aware of their existence.

Here’s an example of a typical mechanism from a few years ago:

I appreciate, as much as anyone, this document is not at all perfect

but it is one hell of a lot better than before

guidance can be updated every year

governments change

until then we have a great document to hold schools feet to the fire and make sure they are absolutely complying with separated facilities - that will make a huge huge change and I am sure, discourage a lot of kids from dallying with this nonsense at all

after all if you can;t be affirmed in toilets and changing rooms - you're just playing around and other kids will focus on that.

@noblegiraffe

"Children who are seeking social transition should now also be told of the risks and benefits of social transition according to best evidence, and this should be done by someone with clinical training."

Which makes it something of a shame that no medical organisation has considered it worth doing the research to find out the risks and benefits are.

Well we have the study from Finland that suggests puberty blockers aren’t associated with an improvement in mental health so that’s a start. And we know that starting blockers puts you on a medical pathway with much more serious outcomes that need to be considered. Cass also warns that social transition is an active intervention with risks.

The NHS/KCL Pathways studies could provide interesting evidence about the impact of more general gender care (I’m assuming they’re still recruiting to the Horizon study even if the puberty blocker trial part of the programme is paused).

There are definitely risks that we know about that haven’t been part of the conversation before.

I wonder what people in a hundred years time will look back and think?

It’s for safety reasons because of people collapsing inside the cubicle. You should make sure enough staff know how to open the doors at school.

Ah! Can be opened from the outside and can easily be opened from the outside read differently I think. I was imagining those locks where you can use a 2p coin in the groove on the outside and just turn to open. Those would be awful in a school, no one would ever go to the toilet!

@noblegiraffe

Yes you're right. I had somehow forgotten the Finland study.

There are so many different designs used in schools. Someone sent me a link to a Waterloo Rd episode last year where the storyline was a girl had collapsed in the girls’ loos (with a decent door gap!) due to endometriosis and I was impressed with her ‘friend’ using a hair grip to get in in seconds. I am presuming this is a real school building they use.
Back in my teaching days I know a coin turn lock was used.

Yes, my DS' secondary has this. Completely shared space with washbasins opposite row of cubicles. The space is also very open plan with all cubicle doors visible from main corridor. The school is a relative new build and they were built this way.
None of the kids like it, boys or girls. I've tried raising with the school but they are not interested. Be interesting to see how they respond to this

@DabOfPistachio yes, especially as the DfE were happy to promote these designs. They didn’t used to be. When they were first suggested around 2000, the DfE refused them, particularly for religious reasons. Parents complained it wasn’t good for girls and students would have sex in them. But a few years later they ploughed ahead. Scotland and Wales are as bad.

If anyone wants more on the new design guidelines (for England) and how manufacturers are interpreting them, I have found this manufacturer always seems to be good:
https://www.bushboard-washrooms.co.uk/contentfiles/downloads/BushboardWashrooms_DepartmentForEducationRegulationsExplained2026.pdf
Note floor to door gaps are optional because of 5mm or less prevents taking photos (boys taking pictures of girls with smartphones) but female sanitary product dispensers have to be hidden (from boys) in the girls suite.

Girls toilet designs based on mitigating boys behaviour. I know girls toilets can be bad too but mixing them was always going to be a bad idea, particularly as you then have to make the cubicle completely private.

I am intending to use the cost of these single occupancy toilets as a reason to not put many (any) in at my local secondary

Taking it back to KCSiE, I like the implication that incidents in toilets should be recorded in
109-111. I did an FOI asking for the incidents in school toilets (rapes, sexual assaults, deaths, etc) and not only could they not tell me as it would take too long, but they said it would take too many man hours to even find out if they had the ability to tell me. I know from research that numbers are into the double figures of school staff (all male) who have been barred for hiding cameras in school toilets, for example. To design out crime you need to know the design and the crime. All this information should be fed into a system for safeguarding. Ofsted were clear on keeping records that were then collated centrally several years ago.

This.

It's a very useful lever for slightly timid members of staff, governors, parents who didn't want to be branded transphobic bigots to say 'safeguarding requires single sex facilities to mean single sex' and to be a bit braver in standing up for safeguarding and against bullying (because inserting a boy into the girls facilities is bullying of the girls).

Honestly don't know where schools who've been forcing girls to undress in front of male children will hide. They're failing to safeguard and acting against KCSIE if they do this. It's a massive safeguarding failure.

Surely @SingleSexSpacesInSchools your case is slam dunk now? It always should have been, really, but here we are.

I also think this idea that on the one hand there's so much about bullying in KCSIE but the idea that boys might pretend to be 'gender questioning' to bully and intimidate the girls is never even entertained is woefully naive. And indeed the stuff about 'emotional abuse' is in there but the idea an adult might specifically get a job in a school to bully and coerce children into their pet activist cause, or 'affirmation', as we know has happened, is also woefully naive.

Far from ideal - the bit about pronouns needs to be far more explicit, including the coercive and emotionally abusive nature of any request to compel language against normal English - but also far better than before.

An excellent, typically insightful piece from Transgender Trend:

https://www.transgendertrend.com/kcsie-2026-advises-caution-fails-explain-why/

Written by the author of Read some Piaget please on X :

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1

Finally had an opportunity to catch up on this.

Great comments from PPs.

Overall, a step forward. But it's appalling that any activist teacher can hold confidential conversations up to the point that a child makes a request to socially transition. That really is a huge loophole. It's not rocket science to recognise the risk that such teachers will position themselves as caring and acting (to the child) in the child's best interest.... as they coach the child exactly how to back mum and dad into a corner so that when the request does come, it's been loaded with an emotional Trojan horse.

The wording is shocking:

The advice above applies in cases where a child has requested support with social transition. In cases where a child confides in a member of staff about their feelings but does not ask the school or college to make changes to how they are treated, there is no reason to break any confidence unless there is a related safeguarding risk.

What I would like to know is when on earth isn't there a safeguarding risk when a child becomes gender questioning? That's the critical thinking layer that I've seen consistently missing in the staff who were sympathetic to my concerns about my daughter. They genuinely seemed to believe that gender questioning children were totally fine if their parents were on board with their social transition. It was a fascinating conversation trying to unpick it but also very frustrating. It was infinitely better than the staff who considered me a safeguarding risk because of my concerns about the conflation of autism and gender identity and/or sexual orientation and gender identity. But it's a fundamental flaw in the guidance to position being gender questioning as sometimes not a safeguarding risk. By it's very definition it is: every paragraph above lays out why. To compound that by allowing secret conversations between staff and such children is awful.

Well said. I think there are parts of KCSIE (and this is one) which seem to be written by someone who doesn't really understand the purpose of safeguarding. Some bits are contradictory with other bits.

The inability to be clear, the obfuscation around names and pronouns and what, exactly you're balancing between the demand of one child and the impact on others - that's anti-safeguarding. Safeguarding should involve effective and clear communication.

Still, better than before.

Thinking about anti-safeguarding....

While the protection for children who haven't yet started puberty is generally pretty good, those that already have (the vast majority of gender questioning children) not so much:

271. Primary schools should exercise particular caution, and we would expect support for full social transition to be agreed very rarely. Schools should keep in mind the emphasis in the Cass Review on early clinical involvement when families are considering social transition for pre-pubertal children, including how to support their children in a non-directive way, whilst also keeping options open and flexible. The Cass Review emphasised that clinical involvement in the decision-making process should include advising on the risks and benefits of social transition as a planned intervention, referencing best available evidence. This is not a role that can be undertaken by staff without appropriate clinical training.

272. The Cass Review acknowledges that older children will generally have
greater agency to make their own decisions. Maintaining flexibility and keeping children’s options open will help to avoid a child feeling they are under pressure to commit to a potentially irrevocable pathway when they are young.

The key question here is what does "maintaining flexibility" actually mean? It's got exactly the same issue as the definition of "neutral".

My version of both these things, when supporting my daughter through the early stages of being gender questioning, was to say that nothing changes while you explore your feelings. I told my daughter this meant remembering that you're a biological female, using she/her pronouns and not taking any steps that move you away from this.

By this stage, my daughter already had an androgynous-sounding name she was using at school (I had no idea about the risks of social transition when we agreed for this to be her "known as" name) but thankfully someone on MN pointed out that this is simply a nickname. Although we used it ourselves for a bit, at her request we ended up going back to her original nickname at home. That nickname is a diminutive of her name.

A good example of this approach during a later stage was that I said no to using "trans tape" when she wanted to use this as an alternative to her sports bra under her swimming rash vest (because she didn't like the seams of the sports bra being visible) but, after a conversation with her GP (my daughter suggested we did this together with him) to help us find an approach that met what she was looking for and was both safe and neutral, she ended up using sports tape. As time went on, she got fed up with using it, accepted that it was expensive and seemed to feel less bothered about the original issue. She realised the reality was that she only uses her rash vest abroad and nobody knows her. When she's swimming in the sea in the UK she's in a wetsuit.

That is what I think of regarding maintaining flexibility and being neutral: holding the status quo while exploring everything. Most of that exploration was about how she felt about her body. When she started her gender questioning journey, I had accepted that her exploration might have resulted in transition. The difficult part was finding professionals in education who didn't immediately leap to the idea that using preferred pronouns was a neutral way of taking things in a slow and considered way. That approach is very much the opposite of neutral and maintaining flexibility. It also didn't help that the school leadership, including the DSL, considered me a safeguarding risk to my daughter because of my "views". Thankfully, although bumpy, the journey to find neutral professionals in healthcare was easier.

When I read the latest version of KCSIE I can already see that activist DSLs and/or other senior leaders will most likely carry on as they are.

Hopefully there won't be too many schools with this set-up and most DSLs and heads will start acting sensibly in the interests of the child. Sadly it's still going to require them to have good critical thinking skills to make that happen, particularly the DSL who will lead the training (given nobody else actually has to read part 2 of the guidance). It's a shame that the KCSIE isn't stronger to help genuinely neutral leaders on that journey and to help identify the activists.

Edited for typos.

This thread and letter are very good
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5553216-letter-to-secondary-schools-ensure-the-ehrc-code-on-single-sex-spaces-is-being-followed-in-september-draft-letter-for-feedback

This is where we see the impact of transactivistm. Zero interest in children's welfare and safety but insistent on promoting their demands. Hence the contradictions.

A school safeguarding policy is aimed all the adults in a school - teachers, dinner staff, cleaners, caretakers, office staff, everyone. All with varying degrees of understanding of safeguarding. Which is why you don't tell them to keep this type of secret but not others. You tell them never to promise confidentiality and to always refer. That's safeguarding 101.

It's only since transactivists have been able to erode safeguarding principles that you get this dangerous notion that there are certain "special secrets" that adults can keep. Hopefully the reality is that good schools will continue to ensure that "never promise confidentiality and always share info with the DSL etc" will prevail.
Children's safety mustn't be compromised any more by the ideological wishes of transactivists.