Supporting KCSIE 2026 safeguarding requirements
Registration is now open!
Keeping up with safeguarding guidance is one thing. Turning it into meaningful practice is another.
That’s why we’re bringing together DSLs, school leaders and safeguarding experts for our KCSIE Conference 2026: Safeguarding in Practice.
Taking place on 8 October 2026 at NetSupport HQ in Peterborough, this free event will explore the practical implications of the new KCSIE 2026 guidance through expert keynote sessions, real-world case studies and panel discussions with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), SWGfL, Traci Gregory, Alan Mackenzie, Andrew Baldock, Alex Dixon, Leah Miller and CPOMS!
Supporting your KCSIE 2026 responsibilities
classroom.cloud’s safeguarding tools help schools identify concerning activity, understand context and spot safeguarding trends, supporting staff in responding to potential risks.
KCSIE 2026 requires schools and colleges to have appropriate filtering and monitoring systems in place and to review their effectiveness at least annually.
classroom.cloud complements a school’s wider filtering and monitoring provision by providing monitoring, safeguarding, reporting and internet/application control tools. Schools remain responsible for ensuring their overall filtering and monitoring arrangements are appropriate and effective.
Monitoring for concerns
Para 171: “…governing bodies and proprietors should ensure their school or college has appropriate filtering and monitoring systems in place…”
DfE Filtering and Monitoring Core Standard: “How your students’ risk profile could inform your approach to filtering and monitoring, considering things such as their age, if they have any special education needs and disabilities (SEND) and whether they have English as an additional language (EAL).”
Keyword monitoring
By monitoring the safeguarding keywords and phrases your students type, your school can gain an insight into any trending issues, as well as identify individual students who are engaged in concerning activity.
The keyword monitoring tool is powered by a pre-supplied safeguarding database of keywords and phrases, containing over 20,000 terms! The database covers a wide range of topics from self-harm, gambling, bullying and racism – to risks of radicalisation, drugs, sexual exploitation and more.
Language packs
Several language packs are included to ensure your school can monitor concerning activity in students’ first languages.
Slang terms are also taken into account, which can be crucial in intercepting inappropriate communications of young people who can sometimes appear to have their own language!
Updating and sharing your keywords
We update the database regularly with new terms (including AI keywords) because, as we all know, it’s an ever-changing landscape. To help with this, classroom.cloud not only gives you the power to add your own keywords to the database that are relevant to your school and community – and even share them across your trust – but you can also share them with us if you want to! That way, you can help all schools be as safe as possible by working with us to provide the most up-to-date and relevant keywords to help keep all of our children safe.
Early indicators and children potentially at greater risk of harm
Para 171: “Governing bodies and proprietors should consider the number of and age range of their children, those who are potentially at greater risk of harm and how often they access the IT system along with the proportionality of costs versus safeguarding risks.”
Para 19: “All staff should be aware that abuse, neglect, exploitation, and safeguarding issues are rarely standalone events and cannot be covered by one definition or one label alone. In most cases, multiple issues will overlap.”
Word cloud of trending topics
When a keyword or phrase is triggered from something a student has typed, copied or searched for, it populates a word cloud. This is a nice easy way to spot trending topics. Click on any word in the cloud and you can see a full explanation and definition to help you understand the potential risk, along with a detailed list of instances where it has been triggered by your students.
Safeguarding Groups
These can be created to deliver focused monitoring of, for example, specific year groups or students considered vulnerable. Specific settings can be applied to each group of student devices.
Filter by student
It provides a fast, focused view of an individual student’s online activity, making it easier to review concerns without searching through data from an entire class. You can see a list of all previous incidences helping to build a clearer picture of behaviour and identify patterns over time.
Harmful and inappropriate online material, including AI
Para 163: “content: being exposed to illegal, inappropriate, or harmful content, for example: pornography, racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicide, antisemitism, radicalisation, extremism, extreme sexual or physical violence, misinformation, disinformation (including fake news) and conspiracy theories.
Para 163: “contact: being subjected to harmful online interaction with other users or generative AI applications that simulate this; for example: peer to peer pressure, commercial advertising and adults posing as children or young adults with the intention to groom or exploit them for sexual, criminal, financial or other purposes, conduct: online behaviour that increases the likelihood of, or causes, harm; for example, making, sending and receiving explicit images, including those generated using AI and online bullying…”
Para 175: The department has published Generative AI: product safety expectations to support schools to use generative artificial intelligence safely and explains how filtering and monitoring requirements apply to the use of generative AI in education.
Image Analysis
The Image Analysis feature in the enhanced safeguarding toolkit helps to monitor and detect inappropriate images displayed on students’ screens from websites, apps and media – under the following categories: Adult, Drugs, Racism, Radicalisation and Weapon. Schools can enable these categories as needed and an alert is sent to staff when a student may have viewed the harmful content.
AI monitoring
Building on our Microsoft Teams safeguarding platform, we can now capture Copilot triggers when the student is signed into Copilot using their school’s account. When a student is using the AI tool and triggers a safeguarding alert, the event is captured along with details of the application in use. Students’ Copilot chats can also be monitored. You can filter the events to only view those captured in an AI tool or website. This helps safeguarding staff understand the context of the trigger and identify activity involving AI tools.
Capturing concerns and reporting
Para 171: “…a review of their effectiveness is carried out at least once every academic year. Reviews should be carried out by the SLT member responsible for filtering and monitoring, with the support of the school’s designated safeguarding lead and IT support. They should include checks that filtering is working appropriately on all internet-connected devices in all relevant locations, and a record should be kept of these checks. They should ensure that the leadership team and relevant staff have an awareness and understanding of the provisions in place and manage them effectively and know how to escalate concerns when identified.”
Capturing concerning activity
In addition to populating the word cloud, each triggered keyword is also captured immediately as an ‘event’. And according to how severe these are, staff can view them as a simple text record (low severity), a screenshot of the screen, or a screen recording (high severity). For all events, you can review information including details such as student name, the device being used and the time it took place, along with the Risk Index analysis…
The contextual intelligence-based Risk Index helps your school determine the severity of triggered events and ensures you can quickly and easily identify and support vulnerable students.
It works like this:
The Risk Index assesses the context and history of a student’s current activities (the device used, time of day, websites visited and applications used) and considers them alongside any previous alerts they may have triggered. From this information, it creates a risk index number that is applied to the event. So, if a student has repeatedly researched a safeguarding topic (e.g. suicide) out of hours, in an unmonitored setting such as the library, a high risk index could result. A lower index rating could come from a student searching a lower risk keyword in a local application during school hours that may have been used for curriculum topics. You can configure email alerts to inform the appropriate staff when students trigger a monitored keyword or phrase – and the safeguarding tab gives you an easy-to-see overview of when new triggers occur.
Records should include:
Para 72:
• a clear and comprehensive summary of the concern
• details of how the concern was followed up and resolved, and
• a note of any action taken, decisions reached and the outcome.
Para 127:
To ensure continuity of safeguarding responsibilities, schools should implement robust cover arrangements for periods when the designated safeguarding lead is unavailable due to illness, leave, or other circumstances… to ensure that safeguarding concerns are received, monitored, and acted upon without delay.
Keeping track of events
New events are flagged on the safeguarding tab of the web portal so that you can see immediately how many phrase matches have been identified and are ready for review.
To help staff to keep track of which triggers need reviewing (or to let supporting staff know where to pick up when you are on holiday), all new events are highlighted as being ‘new’ – and, as you review them, they can be marked as ‘in progress’ or ‘complete’. You can also add notes and enter details of any follow-up actions. In addition, you can print, save or email details of a triggered event, or forward a screengrab of the results to a co-worker to follow up on.
Plus, if staff have access to multiple sites, they can now view triggered events across all of them at once (if selected), making it even quicker to find and support those in need.
Integration with Tes MyConcern and CPOMS:
For schools with a Tes MyConcern or CPOMS account, you can now directly integrate it with classroom.cloud. This means that when you’re reviewing a triggered event, you can link it to a student in your Tes MyConcern or CPOMS account and then view it in both classroom.cloud and Tes MyConcern and/or CPOMS.
Reports
Online safety summary reports:
Create and send custom (daily/weekly/monthly) phrase match and student concern reports to nominated staff. The email alert contains a link to the portal where the information will be displayed. Watch a video here.
Power BI
Once connected with classroom.cloud, you can load ImageMatches and PhraseMatches tables into your Power BI desktop app. You can then create and manage detailed reports.
Choose your monitoring settings
The last thing anyone wants when monitoring online digital safety is false alarms. So, to help you reduce these, you can also choose whether to exclude certain applications and websites from being monitored. So, for example, if students are using PowerPoint or Excel, you could exempt them
from monitoring so you can focus on more high-risk areas.
Integration with Microsoft Teams:
You can choose to connect the school’s Microsoft 365 tenancy so you can monitor Teams chats, channels and more. And in the same way, you can exclude selected channels and users from monitoring, such as teachers’ chats. The filtering of Teams groups has been enhanced to make it easier to find the group you would like to monitor for safeguarding purposes.
Blur images:
When reviewing a triggered event, if you are concerned about exposing a staff member to pictures that might offend, you can choose to blur any images or screenshots. The blurring of images can also help events to be reviewed sensitively with students.
Responding to the report
Para 16: “All staff should be aware that children may not feel ready or know how to tell someone that they are being abused, exploited, or neglected, and/or they may not recognise their experiences as harmful. ”
Para 219: “…the department’s statutory guidance on school attendance Working together to improve school attendance which sets out how schools must work with local authority children’s services where school absence indicates safeguarding concerns”
Empower students
Report a concern:
Students can now report a concern by sending a message in confidence to a trusted member of staff. You can select staff to be ‘Concern contacts’ and they will automatically receive an email that confirms the concern logged by a student in classroom.cloud. You can also choose additional staff members to receive the emails who aren’t a primary ‘Concern contact,’ such as those who might need to monitor the issues being reported by students, e.g. a Headteacher.
Custom concern strategies:
When safeguarding staff review a concern, they can assign it to a category. They can use the default keyword categories or add their own to be more specific about the issue. For example, if the concern is about a wellbeing issue, a new, more specific category such as ‘Depression’ or ‘Domestic Abuse’ could be assigned to it. This is handy when reviewing what type of concerns are being reported. This can help highlight early warning signs to link with attendance interventions.
Online resources:
Students have instant access to a range of validated online support resources, including details of helplines and charities (covering topics such as FGM, drug addiction, grooming and bullying), enabling them to explore wellbeing issues on their terms. Staff can also manage the pre-populated list and add any additional resources they feel are appropriate.
Security and access
Para 173: “Identify and assign roles and responsibilities to manage filtering and monitoring systems.”
Para 177: The Cyber security standards for schools and colleges outline actions that schools and colleges should consider implementing to strengthen resilience, reduce the risk of disruption, prevent data breaches, and mitigate safeguarding risks.
Keeping things super secure
The very nature of online digital safety means that it’s a sensitive area that requires confidentiality.
Staff access levels:
To help, classroom.cloud allows schools to set up two levels of staff access: Safeguarding Admins (giving full access to the tools and events) and Safeguarding Users (who can only see triggered keywords and phrases). This ensures only authorised members of staff can access the details of triggered incidents and control the safeguarding settings.
Monitoring hours:
Your school can also specify when you want the students to be monitored, for
example, only during school hours or at all times when the student is using their school device or on
the school network.
Assisted Monitoring (optional)
We’ve partnered with SWGfL to offer Assisted Monitoring, providing an extra pair of hands for UK school safeguarding teams. The team at SWGfL can monitor safeguarding alerts within your classroom.cloud account, helping to assess and prioritise concerns so your team can respond swiftly and effectively. Paired with weekly reports, this additional human insight provides an extra layer of support for the triage of student safeguarding concerns.
Web metering
Para 171: “…governing bodies and proprietors should be doing all that they reasonably can to limit children’s exposure to the above risks from the school or college’s IT system.”
Para 173: “Block harmful and inappropriate content without unreasonably impacting teaching and learning.”
Internet and application controls
With classroom.cloud, you can manage your school’s internet and application use by creating school-wide approved and restricted lists and controlling access by time of day. For example, only allowing access to approved gaming sites for school clubs outside of lesson hours. This feature helps your school to add a broader layer of security while keeping students on task.
Get compliant with classroom.cloud
Supporting compliance is only part of the picture. KCSIE expects schools to have effective filtering and monitoring, but also clear processes for identifying concerns, recording evidence and taking appropriate action. classroom.cloud brings these capabilities together in a single platform, helping schools move from simply detecting risks to managing safeguarding more effectively.
“The main thing is it keeps us in line with the regulations through Keeping Children Safe In Education (KCSIE) – we’ve got that ticked.”
“It proactively sends urgent and high risk alerts so the safeguarding lead is able to see what’s going on and what a child is using.”