The National Safeguarding Panel met on 28 July, on Teams. Two things dominated the agenda: the National Safeguarding Team's Strategic Review 2025, and the work underway to pin down what the Church actually means when it says “safeguarding”. We also picked up a question that's been hovering over us for a while, whether the Panel has any business looking at safeguarding in Church of England schools.
Before anything else, thank you to the people who came and talked us through it all. Julie O'Hara, Kate Dench, Sam Nunney, Alvin Lee, and Vivien Kelly from the NST gave up their morning to be questioned by a room full of people whose job is to ask awkward questions. Several Diocesan Safeguarding Officers and a Parish Safeguarding Officer joined us too, and their contributions were, as ever, the bit that stops the conversation drifting off into abstraction.
The review came out in June and it's the first time the NST has done anything like it. That matters. It sets out the sheer volume of work the team gets through, explains publicly what the NST is actually for, and puts a fair amount on the record that previously wasn't. Panel members liked it. It's clearly laid out, it's written in English rather than in safeguarding, and the charts do real work rather than just filling space.
But we had reservations, and they weren't small ones. We want to help the NST get even better. A report that sets out to demonstrate accountability needs something to be accountable against. This one doesn't have key performance indicators, or much in the way of underlying data, or any way of tracking whether the things it describes are moving. Who owns each piece of work, when it's due, what it costs, how many people are doing it, none of that is there. Several members made the point that adding it wouldn't just satisfy the statisticians among us; it would give the whole thing more momentum and a sharper edge.
We also talked about who's actually reading it. Publishing a report and reaching survivors are two very different achievements, and we spent some time on how the NST might close that gap, including whether there's room for proper “you said, we did” sessions where people can respond to it face to face rather than just receive it.
One big bright spot: the Turning the Page initiative got a warm reception from the Panel. We've agreed to come back to it in July next year and see how it's bedded in.
This is the harder one. Last November the Charity Commission gave the Archbishops' Council a regulatory action plan, having concluded that the Church's current arrangements don't do enough to protect people who come into contact with it from harm. Their particular worry was about the gaps: if someone isn't classed as a vulnerable adult, or if what's happened to them isn't classed as a safeguarding matter, they can end up getting no response whatsoever. Victims and survivors have been saying this for years. So have parish and diocesan officers, and members of the public.
So, the NST is working on definitions, and it brought that work to us. The discussion ranged widely, but it kept returning to thresholds. Wherever you draw a line, people will end up on the wrong side of it, and someone has to explain to them why. More than one member drew on experience in local authorities, where thresholds have a habit of quietly shifting to match whatever resource happens to be available rather than what the safeguarding picture demands. That's a real risk here and we said so plainly.
We also wanted to know what this means for the people who'll have to apply it, particularly PSOs, who are volunteers and who may find a new set of expectations landing on them without much notice. And we asked how any of it connects to the Church's thinking on spiritual abuse, which felt like a loose end.
On a more positive note, the Panel was struck by how much the NST had clearly learned from its first church-wide consultation and carried into the later rounds. That's not always visible in this sort of work, and it was good to see.
Briefly, on schools: we concluded that detailed scrutiny of school safeguarding isn't ours to do. Schools sit under a different regulatory and quality assurance regime, with their own governance. But parishes and primary schools are often woven together, shared communities, clergy on governing bodies, activity that belongs to both and neither. So, we do think the NSSG should be able to say with confidence how the preventative work on both sides of that line joins up.
We've sent fifteen recommendations to the National Safeguarding Steering Group. I'm not going to set them out here, because they haven't been considered yet and it wouldn't be right to present them as settled. Once the NSSG has looked at them, we'll say more.
One recommendation I will mention, since it's about us rather than anyone else: we've asked for written updates on how the NST is responding, within a fortnight of the NSSG signing off. Scrutiny that disappears into a drawer isn't scrutiny.
Nazir Afzal OBE
Chair, National Safeguarding Panel
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