By guest author Amit Singh Kalley, Digital Parenting & Digital Safeguarding Specialist, Founder of For Working Parents and former Deputy Headteacher
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Digital safeguarding has outgrown our safeguarding structures
A few months ago, I was speaking with a DSL at an inner-city school who described feeling completely overwhelmed.
Not because of lacking experience, and certainly not because of a lack of care towards their students. They felt overwhelmed because the safeguarding concerns arriving on their desk looked very different from those they had dealt with just a few years earlier.
One case involved a teenage boy being blackmailed after sharing an image online. Another centred on a group of boys whose attitudes towards girls appeared to have been heavily influenced by misogynistic content consumed online. A third involved concerns around AI-generated imagery and the misuse of photographs taken from social media.
As we talked, it was clear to me that this DSL wasn’t confident in how to deal with or respond to the cases. They were learning on the job, as new online related cases arrived.
While safeguarding has always evolved alongside society, the pace of change in the digital world is unlike anything most schools have experienced before.
The reality is that childhood has changed and the safeguarding challenges facing schools have changed. However, safeguarding structures haven’t changed quickly enough to keep pace.
Childhood now happens in digital spaces
For today’s children, the distinction between online and offline life is becoming increasingly meaningless. When I speak to parents, I often hear adults refer to the online world as though it is a separate place.
But the reality is, many children see the online world as their main world.
Their friendships exist online. Their social lives exist online. Their arguments, relationships, interests, identities and communities often exist online too. For many young people, digital spaces are not somewhere they go. They are simply part of where they live.
According to Ofcom, children aged 8–14 spend almost three hours every day online using internet-connected devices, with older children spending significantly longer.
At the same time, 81% of 10–12-year-olds are already using at least one social media platform despite most platforms having a minimum age requirement of 13. A nationwide ban on social media for children will definitely have an impact, but there is still so much that needs to be done alongside a potential bam.
If children are spending a significant proportion of their lives in digital spaces, many of which are unknown and change regularly, it follows that safeguarding must also extend into those spaces.
That sounds obvious. Yet too often digital safeguarding continues to be viewed as an additional responsibility rather than a central safeguarding concern. I would argue that position is now impossible to defend.
Online harms are no longer niche concerns
There was a time when discussions about online safety (which is a term that really downplays how big this issue is) focused primarily on cyberbullying, stranger danger and inappropriate content. Those risks haven’t disappeared. However, the landscape has become considerably more complex.
Today, schools are increasingly encountering concerns involving sextortion, image-based abuse, online coercion, harmful online communities, extremist content, misogynistic influencers, AI-generated imagery and deepfake technology.
The Children’s Commissioner has recently raised concerns about the rapid growth of AI-powered nudification tools capable of generating sexually explicit images from ordinary photographs.
The National Crime Agency continues to issue warnings about the rise of financially motivated sexual extortion targeting children and young people, particularly boys. Police forces, safeguarding partnerships and schools are reporting incidents that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few years ago.
Before schools have developed confidence responding to one challenge, another appears. The platforms change. The language changes. The risks evolve. Meanwhile, safeguarding professionals are expected to keep pace.
We cannot keep adding responsibilities to the DSL role
One of the reasons I feel strongly about this issue is because I have enormous respect for Designated Safeguarding Leads. Having worked in schools for many years, including as a senior leader and a safeguarding lead, I understand the pressure they face.
The role has never been more important. But it’s a role that is now becoming more and more demanding, and we’re at serious risk of it leading to burnout or good colleagues not wanting to take it on.
DSLs are expected to oversee safeguarding systems, manage referrals, support vulnerable children, work with external agencies, maintain records, train staff, engage with families and provide strategic leadership across their organisations.
Alongside this, every new safeguarding challenge eventually finds its way to their door.
Every year, we see KCSIE add more and more online elements to what is expected of school safeguarding. We’re in a world where demands and expectations have increased, but specialist support and training is almost non-existent.
We’ve fallen into a dangerous habit where each year we identify new risks and we update guidance, adding further responsibilities to already stretched colleagues, but we don’t seem to be asking whether the people expected to manage these risks have received the specialist training needed to do so confidently.
We would never expect a safeguarding lead to investigate complex child exploitation concerns without appropriate training. Yet, every day, safeguarding professionals are being asked to navigate AI-generated abuse, online radicalisation, digital coercion and emerging technologies with limited specialist support.
Digital safeguarding is not an IT issue
Another challenge is the tendency to position digital safeguarding, or the weakened term, online safety, with the Computing Lead. Whilst this might be down to budget and/or staffing constraints, this positioning only serves to hold schools back.
Technology may be the medium through which harm occurs but digital safeguarding is fundamentally about people.
It’s about relationships, vulnerability, influence, behaviour, exploitation, belonging, and wellbeing.
That’s why digital safeguarding cannot be reduced to monitoring software or annual online safety assemblies that repeat the same, simple message that students have already heard and already know.
True digital safeguarding requires a change of culture. It needs to be driven by leaders, it needs to be integrated into curriculum, it needs staff to feel confident, it needs meaningful parental engagement, and it needs strategic thinking and oversight.
In reality, digital safeguarding should be embedded and visible throughout school life. Students should explore online influence, consent, misinformation, digital identity and healthy relationships across multiple subjects and year groups.
Staff should understand the warning signs associated with emerging online harms. Parents should be supported to take ownership of navigating a digital landscape that can feel overwhelming. Most importantly, schools should have a clear strategy that connects all of these elements together.
Why every school needs a Designated Digital Safeguarding Lead (DDiSL)
Over the last few years, I have become increasingly convinced that schools need access to specialist digital safeguarding expertise, because the scale and complexity of the challenge now demands it.
My vision is for schools, colleges and trusts to develop Designated Digital Safeguarding Leads who work alongside Designated Safeguarding Leads, strengthening and complementing existing provision.
The DSL remains responsible for safeguarding leadership. The DDiSL becomes a specialist in digital safeguarding.
They understand emerging technologies, help identify digital vulnerabilities, support complex investigations, lead staff development, engage parents, stay ahead of emerging trends, and review organisational risk. They help create a culture where digital safeguarding becomes embedded rather than bolted on.
This vision ultimately led me to develop what I believe is the UK’s first dedicated Designated Digital Safeguarding Lead training pathway.
The programme has been created because safeguarding professionals repeatedly tell me they encounter increasingly complex digital harms without having received specialist training in how to respond effectively.
The comprehensive and practical training is designed to help bridge that gap and build specialist expertise within schools, colleges and trusts. But, for me, this conversation is bigger than any single training programme. The training is simply one response to a much larger challenge.
A call for change
My mission is to, over time, apply enough pressure on the Department for Education to create and help fund Designated Digital Safeguarding Leads in every school. Not because technology is more important than other safeguarding concerns but because technology now intersects with almost all of them.
The children in our schools are growing up in a world shaped by social media, algorithms, AI, influencers, online communities and constant connectivity, and so the systems we create to protect them must reflect that reality.
I would love to see every school and trust have access to specialist digital safeguarding expertise. I would love to see greater investment in training and ultimately, I would love for policymakers to recognise that digital safeguarding is no longer a niche concern operating on the margins of safeguarding practice; it sits at the very heart of it.
Twenty years ago, the education sector recognised the need for specialist safeguarding leadership and the Designated Safeguarding Lead became an essential, senior part of school life. I believe we’re approaching another such moment.
The question isn’t whether digital safeguarding matters because the evidence already answers that. The question is whether we are prepared to build the expertise, leadership and capacity needed to respond to the realities of digital childhoods today.
For me, the answer is clear. Digital safeguarding has outgrown our current structures. It’s time for our structures to evolve.
