New national research from CPOMS reveals a safeguarding data maturity gap: schools feel ready for inspection, but for most, spotting real trends and patterns in their safeguarding data still takes manual effort.
SEPTEMBER 2026, UK — Safeguarding leads across the UK are logging concerns at real volume: 99% recorded at least one safeguarding referral last year, and 57% logged between 11 and 50. But when asked how confidently they can spot trends and patterns in their own safeguarding data, just 12.5% said their data actively shapes day-to-day safeguarding decisions — while many can only spot patterns with significant manual effort.
That’s the central finding from CPOMS’ Universal Safeguarding™ Benchmark Report, produced in partnership with Censuswide and based on a survey of 200 safeguarding leads across UK schools and education settings. Universal Safeguarding is CPOMS’ framework for safeguarding across the whole school, including pupils, staff and visitors.
That data gap exists alongside a very different kind of confidence: 96% of schools say they’re confident or very confident their practices would meet inspection requirements. But that confidence doesn’t hold all the way through the process — more than a quarter of schools report limited visibility once a case is referred on, meaning many safeguarding leads lose sight of what happens next, even in cases they raised themselves.
Rick Gardner, Managing Director of CPOMS, said: “Confidence is not the same as insight, and this research shows how wide that gap still is for many schools.”
“This is exactly what Universal Safeguarding is designed to address: connecting people, processes, systems and information across the whole setting, so schools can spot emerging risks sooner, make better-informed decisions and act earlier, before concerns escalate.”
Closing that gap is easier said than done — part of the difficulty is scale. Safeguarding leads could select more than one category, and the concerns they log span real breadth: attendance (31%) and mental health (30%) came up most often, followed by child-on-child abuse (23.5%) and neglect and online safety (both 22.5%). The more categories a pattern has to be spotted across, the easier it is for that pattern to stay hidden — and that shows up in how schools operate day to day. The sector is also split on how proactively it approaches safeguarding: 35% describe their approach as reactive, 33% as balanced, and 32% as proactive. Most schools sit in the middle — spotting concerns earlier than they once did, but still managing many of them reactively rather than through structured prevention.
Staff safeguarding is less standardised, but no less central to Universal Safeguarding. Just 32% of schools use a dedicated system to log concerns about staff and adults, while 21% still rely on paper-based records and 19.5% report concerns verbally with limited documentation. Closing that gap matters: Universal Safeguarding depends on capturing concerns consistently across the whole school community — not just pupils.
Under Universal Safeguarding, knowing who’s on site — and why — is treated as a safeguarding question, not just an administrative one. It’s the same standard that schools already apply to pupil and staff records. Visitor management tells a similar story of partial progress: just 44% of schools use a fully digital visitor system, and a further 29% rely on digital tools with a paper fallback,meaning more than halfstill depend on paper at some point when tracking who’s on site. The findings land as schools prepare for updated Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance, coming into force this month. The update places greater emphasis on safeguarding across the whole school workforce and on the relationship between mental health and safeguarding.
You can read the full report here.
Press Contact
Amelia Mennell
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About CPOMS
CPOMS is the trusted provider of safeguarding, wellbeing and pastoral software used by over 21,000 settings worldwide. Its systems are widely used across nurseries, schools, colleges, charities and sports clubs to protect children and support staff. CPOMS also supports Local Authorities by simplifying the sharing of sensitive information across agencies. As part of the Raptor Technologies group, CPOMS continues to expand its reach and capabilities.
