Child Protection Week is an opportunity to reflect on how we can better safeguard children, not just through good intentions, but through effective and practical action. In this article, we turn our attention to a challenge we often encounter – an overreliance on policies.

While policies are essential, they’re not a silver bullet. When they become too numerous, too complex, or aren’t fully embedded, they can hinder child safeguarding rather than help it.

In our education and training sessions, we sometimes explore a case study from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that looks at allegations against Jonathan Lord.

When things went wrong, the Outside School Hours Care service where Lord worked had over 80 policies related to child safety. However, the Royal Commission found that these policies were complex, inconsistent, and poorly communicated to staff. People didn’t know how to apply the policies because induction and training were inadequate. Staff, including managers, even breached policies related to babysitting and attending outside activities with children from the service without consequences.

Safeguarding policies should guide behaviour, set clear boundaries, and help people understand what’s right, what’s wrong, and what to do when something isn’t safe. Ideally, policies should function like tools in a well-organised toolbox – easy to access, easy to use, and fit for purpose.

Imagine you’re at work, feeling busy and feeling overwhelmed. As part of your job, you’ve been shown a cupboard crammed with 20 overflowing toolboxes. You use a few key tools for daily maintenance. However, there are many other gadgets that you never use. Some tools are labelled vaguely. Others have instructions that contradict each other. Some look familiar, but you’ve been told they’ve changed recently, and you’ll need training to use them. One day, a pipe bursts. You want to help, but you’re at a loss. Firstly, you don’t know which toolbox to open – there are so many. And then you remember seeing your supervisor ignore a similar leak, so you second-guess what you should do. You’re worried you’ll be blamed or even fired if you pick the wrong implement and try to tackle the problem yourself. So instead of acting, you hesitate. Perhaps you even walk away. Not because you don’t care, but because it’s too confusing and overwhelming. And maybe even riskier to act than to do nothing.

We want to avoid this happening, which is why we try to empower everyone in an organisation, from a veteran board member to a new volunteer, to understand what safeguarding means for them; act confidently in their day-to-day practice; and respond well if things do go wrong.

The Building Blocks of safeguarding culture help organisations simplify safeguarding concepts and cut through the noise of compliance. This helps reduce policy overwhelm and supports people in identifying issues and drawing on simple tools from four clearly labelled boxes: Leadership, People, Environments, and Response.

By organising tools in this way, we make safeguarding simple, practical and accessible.