Whistleblowing becomes an EYFS requirement this September

Most people who’ve worked in the sector a while can remember a moment that didn’t sit right. A colleague a bit too rough steering a child to the carpet. Sleep checks signed off that nobody actually did. A door that was meant to be propped open and somehow never was. Small things, usually. The uncomfortable truth is that many of those moments are never raised at all, and children are the ones who pay for the silence.

That’s the gap a change to the EYFS is about to close, and the summer term is the right time to get ahead of it.

What the new requirement actually says

From this September, the EYFS will require every setting to have whistleblowing procedures in place. Alongside the procedures themselves, every member of staff, every student and every volunteer will need to know how to raise concerns about poor or unsafe practice. Not just the safeguarding lead. Not just the permanent team. Everyone who works with your children, including the level 2 student who started three weeks ago. And it applies to poor and unsafe practice in the broadest sense, from safeguarding failures to corners quietly cut on ratios or sleep checks.

For some settings this simply formalises what already happens. For others it will surface an awkward question: if a member of staff saw something worrying tomorrow, would they genuinely know who to tell, and would they trust what happens next?

Why good people stay quiet

Hardly anyone stays silent out of indifference. People stay quiet because the colleague involved is a friend, or senior, or frightening. Because they doubt their own judgement (“maybe I’m overreacting”). Because they’ve seen what happened to the last person who spoke up somewhere else. Hierarchy does a lot of quiet damage here; a new apprentice questioning a room leader’s practice needs a route that doesn’t depend on courage alone.

It helps enormously when staff know the law is on their side. Workers who raise genuine concerns in the public interest have legal protection under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, and training that explains this clearly takes a real weight off people’s shoulders. Our Whistleblowing in Early Years course covers that protection, alongside recognising poor practice and knowing exactly how, and to whom, concerns should go.

Managers can lower the stakes long before September arrives. Talk about near misses openly. Thank the member of staff who queried the medication log instead of bristling at them. Make it plain, out loud and more than once, that raising a concern in good faith will never be punished here, even when the concern turns out to be nothing. People believe what they watch happen far more than what a policy says.

Getting ready over the summer

There’s a practical checklist hiding in the new requirement, and July and August are the time to work through it. A written whistleblowing procedure that names roles rather than individuals who might leave. Clear internal routes, plus the external ones for when internal routes are the problem: the LADO and Ofsted both sit outside your setting for exactly that reason. Induction that covers whistleblowing for students and volunteers, not only employees. And a staff meeting where the subject is discussed out loud, because a policy nobody has ever mentioned is a policy nobody will ever use.

The deeper work is cultural. In settings where questions are normal (“talk me through how you settle him at sleep time?”), concerns surface early, gently and usually informally. In settings where questioning feels like disloyalty, problems grow in the dark until they’re big enough for somebody to have to blow a whistle about. The procedures matter, but the everyday tone matters more, and managers set it.

Nobody enjoys thinking about this subject. But the settings that make speaking up easy are the ones where whistles rarely need blowing at all.