Ask a staffroom when everyone last did safeguarding training and you’ll get a certain kind of pause. “2022, I think.” “It was on Zoom, I remember that much.” The EYFS has now put a number on how long that pause is allowed to be: all staff are expected to refresh their safeguarding training at least every two years.
Two years can sound bureaucratic, another date to chase across a training matrix. It isn’t arbitrary, though, and understanding why makes the chasing easier to care about.
Why two years, not whenever
Part of the answer is simple fading. Safeguarding knowledge is used unevenly; a practitioner might go eighteen months without a disclosure, then face one at 8:45 on a wet Tuesday. What decays isn’t the broad understanding of what abuse is. It’s the crispness: the exact words to use when a child starts talking, the things you must not promise, who you tell and how quickly. Those first ten minutes run on training, and training goes stale.
The bigger reason is that safeguarding itself keeps moving. The September 2025 reforms rewrote chunks of the early years rulebook. Online and contextual risks to young children look different from even three years ago. A practitioner trained in 2022 is confident in a version of the system that no longer quite exists, and confidence in an outdated system is worse than mild uncertainty in the current one.
What a good refresher actually refreshes
A refresher shouldn’t be the basics re-run at half speed for people who’ve heard it all before. Experienced staff need something sharper: what has changed since their last course, the signs and indicators revisited with fresh eyes, their duties when responding to concerns and disclosures, and safer working practice, including what happens when an allegation is made against a member of staff.
It should also send people back to their own setting’s arrangements. Generic training can’t tell a practitioner who their DSL is, where the reporting routes run or what the local thresholds look like, but it can prompt everyone to reconnect with those things while the material is fresh. That last step is where a refresher stops being a certificate and becomes practice.
Online and contextual risks deserve their own mention, because they’re the fastest-moving part of the field. The risks reaching two-year-olds through a family’s devices, and the pressures on older siblings that ripple into a household, weren’t in anyone’s 2022 course. A refresher is where practitioners meet them properly rather than through headlines.
Our Safeguarding Refresher (Early Years) is built exactly this way, for practitioners who already hold safeguarding training: it updates what’s changed, revisits the essentials and sharpens the confidence to act.
Check the matrix before the summer
Late May is a good moment to pull up the training records. Anyone whose safeguarding date tips past the two-year mark during the autumn is best refreshed now, while the setting has some breathing room, rather than in the September crush of new children, new starters and settling-in visits. An online refresher fits into quiet weeks in a way a September afternoon never does.
It also reads well at inspection, for what that’s worth. A matrix where every date is comfortably inside the window says something about a setting before anyone answers a single question.
One more habit turns the refresher from an individual task into a team one: give it ten minutes at the next staff meeting. Ask what surprised people, what’s changed since they last trained, and whether anything in the setting’s own procedures now looks out of date. Training that gets talked about sticks; training that gets certificated and filed doesn’t.
Bring the whole team back inside the two-year window.
The refresher updates experienced practitioners on what’s changed, revisits signs, disclosures and safer working practice, and carries an NFAQ-accredited certificate.
Safeguarding training isn’t a possession, it’s a perishable. The two-year rule just writes on the packet what experienced managers already suspected.