May has arrived, the summer term is finding its rhythm, and if your setting is anything like most, you have a handful of new starters still settling in after Easter. It feels like a good moment to say something we come back to a lot at NNT: safeguarding isn’t really about policies on a shelf. It’s about the people in the room.
Ofsted doesn’t spot the quiet change in a two-year-old. The local authority doesn’t see which child flinches when a door slams. The person who notices is the practitioner who greets that child at 8am, changes them, sits with them at lunch and knows exactly what their normal looks like. That’s why practitioner-level safeguarding training matters so much more than a laminated flowchart by the kettle.
Knowing the signs, in a real child on a real Tuesday
The four categories of abuse (physical, emotional, sexual abuse and neglect) are easy to list and much harder to recognise in practice. Physical signs are sometimes obvious. More often the clues are behavioural: a child who becomes withdrawn, starts hoarding food at snack time, or is suddenly frightened during nappy changes when they never used to be.
Neglect deserves particular attention because it’s the most common category and the easiest to explain away. It comes in physical, emotional, medical and supervisory forms, and it rarely announces itself. A child who arrives hungry once is having a rough morning. A child who arrives hungry most mornings, in the same clothes, with an untreated rash, is telling you something. Good training also draws a line that matters enormously to families: poverty is not neglect. A parent who can’t stretch to new shoes this month is not the same as a parent failing to meet their child’s needs, and muddling the two helps nobody.
When a child tells you something
Disclosures in the early years are rarely tidy. They arrive sideways, at the sand tray or mid-way through a story, in fragments that don’t quite make sense on their own. What you do in that moment counts. Stay calm, even if your stomach has dropped. Use open prompts (“can you tell me more about that?”) rather than leading questions. And never, however kindly meant, promise to keep a secret.
Then comes the part that gets skimped when people are busy: recording. Write down what the child said in their own words, factually, without your interpretation layered on top, and take it to your designated safeguarding lead the same day. Our Safeguarding for Childcare Practitioners (Level 2) course works through all of this with realistic early years examples, so the first time you handle a disclosure isn’t the first time you’ve thought about one.
And if you report a concern and nothing seems to happen? The strengthened EYFS safeguarding requirements introduced in September 2025 put real weight on this. Practitioners are expected to challenge professionally, and to know their whistleblowing routes if concerns aren’t acted on. Escalating isn’t disloyalty to your manager. It’s the job.
Safer working practice protects you as well
There’s a second strand to Level 2 safeguarding that we think deserves more airtime: protecting yourself and your colleagues through safer ways of working. Staying visible, following your setting’s intimate care safeguards, keeping personal devices where your policy says they should be, and understanding how low-level concerns and the allegations process work.
None of this is about suspicion. It’s about building habits that keep children safe and keep honest practitioners above reproach. When everyone in the building works this way, the unusual stands out quickly, which is exactly what you want.
Give every practitioner the confidence to act on a concern
This Level 2 course covers the signs of abuse and neglect, handling disclosures, recording and escalating concerns, and safer working practice, with an NFAQ-accredited certificate on completion.
Whether you’re refreshing a whole team or inducting the new starters who joined you this term, the goal is the same: a room full of adults who know what they’re looking at, and what to do next.