Following the Everyone’s Invited testimonies and Ofsted’s 2021 review, schools in England have found themselves under growing pressure to respond to harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) among young people. In many ways, this pressure is understandable. Schools are one of the few places where patterns of peer sexual harassment, coercion and abuse become visible and, in turn, where opportunities exist for prevention, support and intervention.
Yet across our work with schools through the Everyone’s Safer project, one message emerged repeatedly: safeguarding staff in schools are often being asked to hold an enormous amount, with limited support and within systems that prioritise procedural compliance over relational safety.
Our recently published paper from the project explores these tensions in depth. Drawing on three years of qualitative research across the 30 secondary schools that participated in the Everyone’s Safer project, we examine how safeguarding professionals navigate the emotional, institutional and ethical complexities of responding to harmful sexual behaviour in school communities.
The paper forms part of the wider Everyone’s Safer project led by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation in collaboration with the University of Surrey and supported by the KPMG Foundation. Across three years, the project worked alongside schools to understand what helps schools respond effectively to harmful sexual behaviour and what gets in the way of creating safer, more relational and more trustworthy cultures.
What became clear very quickly was that safeguarding cannot simply be understood as a matter of policies, reporting pathways and sanctions, important though these are. Safeguarding is also emotional labour and interpretive and relational work. Schools are increasingly being asked to undertake this work amid rising levels of need, digital complexity and broader social anxieties around young people, relationships and sexuality.
Safeguarding staff are carrying enormous emotional burdens
One of the clearest findings from the project was the extent to which safeguarding work is experienced emotionally by school staff.
Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs), pastoral staff and senior leaders described feeling constantly ‘on alert’, holding highly distressing disclosures while also navigating procedural expectations, parental tensions, multi-agency working and fears of getting things wrong. Some described lying awake at night replaying decisions they had made during the day. Others spoke about the impossibility of ‘switching off.’
Importantly, this emotional burden was not simply the result of exposure to difficult incidents. It also reflected the tensions built into safeguarding itself.
Staff described constantly moving between institutional and relational demands: needing to follow procedures while also preserving trust with young people; document disclosures while trying not to make students feel surveilled or criminalised; and acting decisively while also recognising the ambiguities and complexities that often characterise peer relationships and adolescent sexual cultures.
Many educators recognised that safeguarding responses can unintentionally damage trust if they become overly procedural or punitive. Some worried that the act of immediately logging a disclosure on a laptop could itself alter the atmosphere of disclosure and make students feel processed rather than heard. These findings reflect those found in other research I’ve conducted investigating the policing of HSB in schools.
At the same time, safeguarding professionals often felt under-supported themselves. The project highlighted strong calls for better supervision, reflective spaces and emotional support for staff responsible for managing HSB cases.
Schools understand HSB as a social and cultural issue, but systems often individualise it
Another striking finding was that educators rarely explained harmful sexual behaviour in simplistic ways.
Staff consistently located HSB within wider social, relational and cultural dynamics relating to gender norms, peer status systems, pornography, trauma, family adversity, online cultures, misogyny and broader inequalities. Many recognised that schools are often dealing with the downstream consequences of wider societal problems. Again, this aligns with findings from the other research on policing HSB in schools.
Yet despite this, schools frequently felt pushed toward narrow, incident-based responses focused on behaviour management, sanctions and procedural risk reduction.
Across this project and the research on policing HSB in schools, we find that when safeguarding systems focus exclusively on identifying ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’, or reducing complex relational dynamics into individual infractions, opportunities for deeper learning and prevention can be lost. Students may become reluctant to disclose concerns if they fear peers will immediately be criminalised or excluded. Staff may become increasingly defensive and risk averse. Schools can end up trapped in cycles of reaction rather than developing cultures capable of addressing the underlying conditions through which harm emerges.
Across the project, many schools expressed frustration that they were being asked to ‘solve’ problems rooted in broader social conditions while lacking the time, resources and structural support needed to do so meaningfully.
This is why whole-school approaches matter, although we need to think carefully about what we mean by them.
Often, ‘whole-school approach’ becomes shorthand for policy updates, assemblies or compliance exercises. But culture cannot be reduced to documentation. Students experience safeguarding through the quality of relationships, the credibility of adult responses, peer dynamics, emotional atmospheres and whether they feel genuinely listened to.
Young people repeatedly highlighted the importance of trust
One of the strongest themes across the project was the gap that sometimes exists between how adults believed safeguarding operated and how young people experienced it.
Students frequently described sexualised bullying, coercive dynamics and online harms as normalised parts of everyday school life. Many explained that they did not report concerns because they feared being disbelieved, socially isolated, labelled a ‘snitch’ or drawn into processes that felt punitive or ineffective.
Importantly, students were not asking schools simply for harsher punishments or more rules.
They wanted adults who could engage seriously with the realities of their lives. They wanted spaces to discuss relationships, pressure, consent, digital intimacy and peer culture in ways that felt relevant rather than performative. They wanted consistency and, ultimately, trust.
This was especially important in relation to digital sexual cultures. Students described experiences of online coercion, image-sharing pressures and reputational harm that often blurred the distinctions between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ life. Yet many also felt that adult responses remained disconnected from the social realities through which these interactions unfolded.
The findings therefore challenge safeguarding approaches that focus solely on surveillance, prohibition or awareness messaging without engaging more deeply with the relational and cultural dynamics young people are navigating.
Moving beyond compliance: safeguarding as relational practice
In the paper, we draw on the domains of production, explanation and aesthetics to think differently about safeguarding practice.
The production domain refers to the visible, procedural aspects of safeguarding: policies, referrals, reporting systems, audits and investigations. These are necessary, with schools needing structures, accountability and clear procedures.
But safeguarding does not operate only in this domain.
The explanatory domain concerns how schools understand and interpret harm. What explanations are prioritised? Where is risk located? How are gender, power, culture and digital life understood? What assumptions shape responses?
Meanwhile, the aesthetic domain concerns how safeguarding is experienced emotionally and relationally. Do students feel safe disclosing? Do staff feel trusted and supported? What atmosphere is created when safeguarding processes unfold? How are care, empathy, shame and authority communicated?
What the project highlighted is that safeguarding systems often privilege production over explanation and aesthetics. In other words, schools become highly focused on compliance and documentation while the relational conditions that enable trust, disclosure and meaningful engagement receive less attention.
Yet students judge safeguarding largely through these relational experiences. A school may have exemplary policies while students still feel profoundly unsafe or unheard.
What does this mean for RSE and prevention?
The findings also have important implications for Relationships and Sex Education (RSE).
Across the project, students consistently responded more positively to approaches that were participatory, dialogic and reflective rather than purely didactic or risk focused. They wanted opportunities to discuss ambiguity, peer pressure, reputation, masculinity, digital culture and relationships in nuanced ways.
This does not mean abandoning boundaries or minimising harm. Rather, it means recognising that young people often navigate complicated relational realities that cannot always be meaningfully addressed through binary frameworks alone.
In many ways, this connects closely to the principles underpinning our wider Reimagining RSE and safe uncertainty work.
Schools require enough certainty to act clearly when harm occurs. Young people need boundaries, accountability and protection. But safeguarding and education also require the capacity to tolerate complexity, remain reflective and engage relationally with uncertainty rather than collapsing immediately into defensiveness, punishment or oversimplification.
A safe uncertainty approach does not mean indecision or relativism. It means holding ethical clarity alongside openness, curiosity and dialogue. It means recognising that trust and safety are not produced solely through control, but through relationships, participation and meaningful engagement.
Safeguarding cannot rest on schools alone
Perhaps the clearest conclusion from the project is that schools cannot carry this responsibility in isolation.
Educators are increasingly being asked to respond to the consequences of wider societal inequalities, gendered harms, digital transformations and systemic failures with insufficient support and under intense scrutiny. While schools undoubtedly play a vital role, safeguarding cannot become a mechanism through which broader social responsibilities are simply imposed onto overstretched staff.
What schools need are not just more procedures, but stronger infrastructures of support: better training, sustained supervision, meaningful multi-agency collaboration, relationally informed policy frameworks and opportunities for reflective practice.
Most importantly, they need permission to move beyond purely reactive and compliance-driven models of safeguarding. Because ultimately, safeguarding is not just about managing incidents after harm occurs. It is about creating school cultures in which trust, reflection, accountability and healthy relationships can meaningfully flourish.
We’ve written before about how policing of HSB in schools can move further toward a model of relationality and away from overly rationalised, incident-driven responses. Check that out here: https://re-imagining-rse.org/blog/beyond-behaviour-rethinking-how-we-police-and-prevent-sexual-harm-in-schools/