What does Ofsted expect schools to know about contextual safeguarding?

Ofsted's inspection frameworks for both schools (Education Inspection Framework) and local authority children's services (ILACS) now include consideration of contextual safeguarding. Inspectors may ask DSLs about how the school identifies and responds to risks outside the home — including peer group risks, local area concerns, and online risks. Schools that demonstrate awareness of their local context, contribute actively to multi-agency assessments of extra-familial risk, and have considered the school environment as a context of potential harm are better placed in inspection. Schools are not expected to replicate the work of children's services, but they are expected to understand the concept and engage with the multi-agency framework.

Contextual Safeguarding: What It Is & How Schools Apply It

Q: What is contextual safeguarding?

Contextual safeguarding is a framework developed by Professor Carlene Firmin at the University of Bedfordshire that recognises children and young people are harmed not only within families but also in wider social contexts — peer groups, neighbourhoods, online spaces, and other settings outside the home. Traditional child protection focuses almost exclusively on the family as the site of risk. Contextual safeguarding extends that lens outward, treating the context itself (a peer group, a location, a social media platform) as a subject of assessment and intervention alongside the family. It is now embedded in Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026 and referenced in KCSIE 2025.

Q: Why is contextual safeguarding important for schools?

Schools occupy a unique position within contextual safeguarding because the school itself is one of the four key contexts of risk — peer relationships, power dynamics, and harmful behaviour within schools are all within scope. Beyond this, schools have daily contact with children and are often the first to observe changes in a young person's peer group, behaviour, or presentation that indicate risk in an external context. DSLs can contribute invaluable real-world observation to contextual assessments led by social workers, and schools can take direct action on peer-group risk (such as curriculum work, restorative approaches, and monitoring social dynamics) that no other agency can replicate.

Q: What are the four contexts of risk in contextual safeguarding?

The four key contexts of risk in Carlene Firmin's contextual safeguarding framework are: (1) Peer groups and friendships — including gangs, exploitative friendships, and harmful social norms within peer networks; (2) Neighbourhoods and public spaces — including locations associated with drug supply, gang activity, or exploitation; (3) Online spaces and social media — including platforms where grooming, exploitation, and harmful content operate; (4) Schools and institutional settings — including peer-on-peer abuse, bullying, and harmful dynamics within the school community. Each context can both generate and sustain harm independently of what is happening in the home.

Q: Does contextual safeguarding replace traditional child protection?

No. Contextual safeguarding is an extension of, not a replacement for, traditional child protection. The family remains a primary focus for safeguarding assessment. What contextual safeguarding adds is the recognition that a child can be safe at home but at serious risk in a context outside it — and that addressing only the family without addressing the context will not keep that child safe. Working Together 2026 requires that assessments consider extra-familial as well as intra-familial risk. The two frameworks work in parallel.

By The Safeguard Hub Team · June 2026 · Last reviewed June 2026 · ⏳ 16 min read

The Safeguard Hub — Contextual safeguarding and extra-familial harm for schools and DSLs

Why the traditional model is not enough

Most serious harm experienced by adolescents occurs outside the home — in peer groups, on social media, in public spaces, and in other institutional settings. A child can be entirely safe within their family yet face severe risk of exploitation, violence, or abuse in contexts their parents are unaware of and traditional child protection assessments rarely reach. Contextual safeguarding is the framework that addresses this gap — and it is now embedded in statutory guidance for schools and children's services across England.

What Is Contextual Safeguarding?

Contextual safeguarding is a theoretical and operational framework developed by Professor Carlene Firmin at the University of Bedfordshire (now at the University of York), first published in 2017 and significantly expanded since.^[1] It reframes child protection from a predominantly family-focused discipline into one that considers the full range of social contexts in which young people live and can be harmed.

At its core, contextual safeguarding makes a simple but powerful argument: the context in which harm occurs must itself be a target of assessment and intervention, not merely a backdrop to family-focused work. If a peer group is generating exploitation or violence, working with the individual child's family will not make that peer group safe. The context — the peer group, the neighbourhood, the online platform, the school — must be treated as part of the problem, and part of the solution.

"Young people are being harmed in a range of social contexts — by peers, in communities and online — that are beyond the influence and reach of their parents and carers. These contexts cannot be addressed through family-focused child protection systems alone."
— Professor Carlene Firmin, Contextual Safeguarding Network

The framework does not replace traditional child protection. It extends it. The family remains a primary focus for safeguarding assessment. What contextual safeguarding adds is the explicit recognition that intra-familial risk is only part of the picture — and that for many adolescents, extra-familial risk is the dominant concern.

Statutory Basis

Contextual safeguarding has moved from academic framework to statutory expectation within a remarkably short period:

Statutory document	Contextual safeguarding reference
Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026	Explicitly requires that assessments of children consider extra-familial as well as intra-familial sources of harm. It states that practitioners must assess "the impact of wider family, community and environmental factors" on a child's welfare.^[2]
KCSIE 2025	References extra-familial harms including peer-on-peer abuse, child criminal exploitation, county lines, and online risks — all of which are manifestations of contextual risk. Schools are required to have systems to identify and respond to these harms.^[3]
Children Act 1989 / 2004	The paramountcy principle (the child's welfare is paramount) has always required a holistic assessment. Contextual safeguarding operationalises this for extra-familial settings.
Ofsted EIF (Education Inspection Framework)	School inspectors now consider whether leaders understand the local safeguarding context, including extra-familial risks relevant to their community. DSLs may be asked about their awareness of contextual risks during inspection.
Ofsted ILACS (Local Authority Children's Services)	Inspectors assess whether children's services apply contextual safeguarding principles when assessing complex cases involving extra-familial risk.

The Four Contexts of Risk

Firmin's framework identifies four primary contexts in which extra-familial harm occurs. In practice, these contexts overlap and interact — a young person recruited into county lines may be groomed through an online platform, exploited through a peer group, and the harm may be concentrated in specific neighbourhood locations.

1. Peer Groups and Friendships

The peer group is the most significant context for extra-familial harm among adolescents. Harmful peer norms — around violence, exploitation, sexual behaviour, substance use, or online conduct — can expose young people to serious risk even where their home life is safe. Exploitation through peer relationships (including "boyfriend" models of grooming in CSE, and gang affiliation in CCE) operates by making the harmful relationship feel normal, reciprocal, or aspirational.

What schools can do: Map changing peer groups for specific children. Note new friendships with older young people or those not known to the school. Observe changes in group dynamics in school — who is being included or excluded, who is being deferred to, what language or symbols are appearing. Record and share these observations with the DSL.

2. Neighbourhoods and Public Spaces

Specific locations — parks, estates, fast-food restaurants, transport hubs, stairwells — can become associated with exploitation, drug supply, violence, or sexual harm. Young people who frequent these locations, or who are seen in or near them by school staff, may be at heightened risk regardless of what is happening at home. County lines drug supply is explicitly a contextual, geographic phenomenon: the "line" connects a city (the hub) to a rural or suburban "county" location via a network of young couriers operating in specific territorial spaces.

What schools can do: Be aware of local intelligence about neighbourhood risks — through the local MASH, community safety partnerships, and police. Share concerns when children are observed in or associated with specific high-risk locations. Consider travel to/from school and whether children are being picked up or accompanied by unknown adults at the school gate.

3. Online Spaces and Social Media

Online environments — including social media platforms, gaming spaces, messaging apps, and the dark web — constitute a distinct context of risk. Online grooming, child sexual exploitation, radicalisation, harmful content exposure, and peer-on-peer abuse (including image-based sexual abuse and cyberbullying) all operate primarily in online contexts. Critically, a child's online context may be entirely invisible to parents and school staff: a young person who appears safe in all visible environments may be experiencing severe harm through an online relationship or community.

What schools can do: Maintain robust online safety education (KCSIE 2025, Part 1). Train all staff to recognise online exploitation indicators — unexplained devices, secretive phone use, withdrawal after device use, new online contacts. Report concerns to the DSL immediately and, where appropriate, to CEOP. Do not attempt to investigate devices or accounts independently.

4. Schools and Institutional Settings

The school itself is a context of risk. Peer-on-peer abuse — including bullying, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and image-based abuse — occurs within and between schools. Power dynamics within the school environment (between peer groups, between year groups, between staff and pupils) can generate and sustain harm. Harmful sexual behaviour, coercive control between young people, and exploitation dynamics within the school community all fall within this context.

What schools can do: Treat the school as a safeguarding environment in its own right, not just a reporting station for harm elsewhere. Apply a contextual lens to peer-on-peer incidents: is there a group dynamic generating individual behaviour? Is a specific location in school associated with repeated incidents? Is there a power imbalance that is enabling repeated harm between specific young people or groups?

Traditional vs Contextual Safeguarding: The Key Differences

Dimension	Traditional child protection	Contextual safeguarding
Primary focus	The family as the site of risk and the target of intervention	The full range of social contexts — family, peer group, neighbourhood, online, institution
Assessment subject	The child and their family	The child, their family, AND the contexts in which harm occurs
Intervention target	Parenting behaviour, family relationships, household risk	Peer group norms, neighbourhood safety, platform safety, school environment — alongside family
Limitation addressed	May miss harm occurring entirely outside the family	Explicitly designed to identify and respond to extra-familial harm
Who leads	Social worker with children's services	Multi-agency — school, police, youth services, MASH, and children's services all have a role
Example scenario	Child disclosed physical abuse by a parent → s.47 investigation, family assessment, child protection plan	Child showing signs of county lines exploitation → assessment of peer group, neighbourhood locations, phone use, school observations, alongside family assessment; multi-agency response to the "county" context as well as the individual child

How Contextual Safeguarding Connects to Common Safeguarding Issues

Contextual safeguarding is not an abstract concept — it is the operational framework that explains how the most prevalent and complex safeguarding issues of the 2020s actually work. Each of the following is fundamentally a contextual harm:

County Lines and Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE)

County lines exploitation is the paradigmatic contextual safeguarding issue. The harm does not occur in the home — it occurs in peer groups (where recruitment happens), in neighbourhoods (the "county" end of the drug supply line), and in transit (transport hubs, roads between cities). A child's parents may be entirely unaware their child is being exploited because the exploitation occurs entirely outside family contexts. Traditional family-focused assessments will consistently miss CCE unless they are supplemented by a contextual lens.

The contextual safeguarding response to CCE includes: mapping which peer groups children at risk belong to; identifying neighbourhood locations associated with the line; working with police and community safety to disrupt the county-end operations; and — crucially — recognising that the child is a victim, not a perpetrator, even where they are actively involved in drug supply.

Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE)

CSE exploiters operate through relationship grooming — presenting as friends, romantic partners, or helpful older figures before the exploitation begins. This grooming almost always occurs through peer groups and online contexts. The school may observe the first signs: a new older "friend" waiting outside school; a child receiving unexplained gifts; a change in peer group; unexplained absences. These are contextual indicators that require a contextual assessment — not just a conversation with the family.

Online Grooming and Sexual Exploitation

Online grooming occurs in a context (a platform, a game, a messaging app) that may be entirely invisible to the family. The Online Safety Act 2023 places new duties on platforms to reduce this risk, but the school remains a key observation and reporting point. DSLs should be alert to children discussing online "friends" they have never met in person, requests to travel to meet someone, or disclosures about receiving sexual messages or images.

Peer-on-Peer Abuse

Peer-on-peer abuse — which KCSIE 2025 explicitly requires schools to address — is itself a contextual harm: it occurs in peer group and school contexts. The school is both the context of harm and the primary responder. A contextual safeguarding approach asks not just "what did this young person do to this other young person?" but "what is it about this peer context that is generating this behaviour, and how do we change the context?"

Radicalisation and Extremism

Radicalisation occurs through peer networks, online communities, and ideological contexts. The Prevent duty requires schools to refer young people at risk of radicalisation — but effective prevention also requires understanding the contextual factors that make specific young people vulnerable: isolation, identity, peer rejection, online exposure to extremist content. Contextual safeguarding provides the framework for this assessment.

The School's Role in Contextual Safeguarding

Schools are uniquely positioned within contextual safeguarding for three reasons:

Observation across contexts. Schools see children's peer groups, social dynamics, appearance, and behaviour every day. They are the only institution with this sustained, multi-context view of a young person's life.
The school is itself a context. The school environment — its peer dynamics, its physical spaces, its power structures — can generate or sustain harm, and the school can directly intervene in it.
Information sharing. School observations about peer groups, neighbourhood connections, and behavioural changes are vital intelligence for contextual assessments led by children's services and police. Without the school's contribution, the contextual picture is incomplete.

Practical actions for DSLs

✅ Building a contextual safeguarding approach in your school

Know your local context. What are the specific contextual risks in your area? What peer groups, gangs, or online communities are operating locally? What neighbourhood locations are associated with risk? Build relationships with local police, youth workers, and community safety partnerships to stay informed.
Train all staff to observe contextually. Every member of staff is an observer of contextual risk. Train them to notice and report: new peer groups, older contacts, unexplained gifts, changes in language or symbols, increased phone use, and territorial behaviour. These are contextual indicators that require the DSL's attention.
Map peer groups and contexts for children of concern. For children already known to the DSL, maintain a record not just of incidents but of the child's social context: who they associate with, where they spend time, what online platforms they use. Share this information with children's services and police at referral.
Review your school environment as a context. Are there physical spaces in your school where peer-on-peer harm is concentrated? Are there peer group dynamics that are generating harmful behaviour? Apply a contextual lens to incident patterns — a cluster of incidents in one location or involving one peer group is a contextual signal, not just a series of individual events.
Contribute actively to multi-agency contextual assessments. When a child is subject to a child protection assessment that includes extra-familial risk, ensure the school provides its contextual observations to the social worker — not just the child's attendance, behaviour, and attainment data, but its knowledge of peer relationships, observed contacts, and school-based indicators.
Think twice before excluding. Exclusion from school removes the child from the one context where adult oversight is guaranteed and adds unstructured time in contexts of risk. For children already involved in CCE or CSE, exclusion can be directly harmful. Always consider the contextual impact of exclusion before proceeding.

The Contextual Assessment: What Schools Contribute

When children's services undertake a child protection assessment with a contextual safeguarding dimension, the school is one of the most important contributors. A well-structured school contribution to a contextual assessment includes:

Information type	What schools can provide
Peer group observations	Names and characteristics of the child's known peer group at school; any new peers who have appeared recently; older young people the child has been seen with; changes in group membership
Behavioural and presentation changes	Timeline of changes in behaviour, mood, attendance, or presentation; what triggered those changes; what staff have observed in school
Physical indicators	Unexplained gifts, new clothing or devices; signs of injury or exhaustion; cash observed; changes in footwear or jewellery associated with gang or group membership
Language and symbols	New vocabulary, slang, or symbols appearing in the child's speech or writing; social media content observed by staff
Attendance and movement	Pattern of absences, late arrivals, and early departures; any school travel observations; who collects the child and when
Online indicators	Any disclosures or observed behaviour relating to online contacts, messaging, or content; reports from other pupils about the child's online activity
School-based incident history	Pattern of peer conflicts, exclusions, or incidents in school that may reflect external group dynamics

This information should be provided in writing to the child's social worker at the point of referral and updated at each review or child protection conference. The school report to a child protection conference should include contextual as well as family-focused observations.

Ofsted and Contextual Safeguarding

Ofsted's Education Inspection Framework (EIF) requires inspectors to evaluate whether school leaders know about and respond to safeguarding risks relevant to their specific community. In practice, this means inspectors may ask DSLs:

What are the specific safeguarding risks in this school's local area?
How does the school identify children who may be at risk in contexts outside the home?
How does the school contribute to multi-agency assessments of extra-familial risk?
What has the school done to address harmful peer dynamics or school-environment risks?
How does the school ensure its response to peer-on-peer incidents considers contextual as well as individual factors?

Schools are not expected to replicate the work of children's services or to conduct formal contextual assessments independently. What Ofsted expects is that DSLs understand the concept, know their local context, and engage meaningfully with the multi-agency system when extra-familial risks are identified.

DSLs preparing for Ofsted should be able to articulate: (1) what the specific contextual risks are in their area; (2) how staff are trained to identify and report contextual indicators; and (3) how the school has contributed to multi-agency responses to specific contextual safeguarding cases.

KCSIE 2025: Extra-Familial Harm Requirements

KCSIE 2025 does not use the phrase "contextual safeguarding" explicitly throughout, but its requirements operationalise the framework. Key provisions:^[3]

Schools must be alert to extra-familial harms — those occurring outside the home in peer groups, online spaces, and communities
DSLs must have a working knowledge of child criminal exploitation, child sexual exploitation, county lines, online grooming, radicalisation, and peer-on-peer abuse — all of which are contextual harms
The school's safeguarding policy must address peer-on-peer abuse specifically, including the contextual factors that enable it
DSLs must be able to make referrals and provide contextually relevant information to children's services for assessments involving extra-familial risk
Schools must have a clear online safety policy and filtering/monitoring arrangements that address risk in online contexts

Frequently Asked Questions

What is contextual safeguarding?

A framework developed by Professor Carlene Firmin that extends child protection beyond the family to address harm occurring in peer groups, neighbourhoods, online spaces, and institutional settings. It recognises that a child can be safe at home but at serious risk in external contexts — and that assessments and interventions must address those contexts directly, not just the family. It is now embedded in Working Together 2026 and KCSIE 2025.

Does contextual safeguarding replace traditional child protection?

No. It extends it. The family remains a primary focus. Contextual safeguarding adds the recognition that intra-familial assessment is not sufficient for adolescents whose harm occurs in peer groups, communities, and online — and that those contexts must themselves be assessed and addressed. Both frameworks operate in parallel.

What are the four contexts of risk?

(1) Peer groups and friendships — gangs, exploitative friendships, harmful peer norms; (2) Neighbourhoods and public spaces — locations associated with drug supply, gang activity, or exploitation; (3) Online spaces and social media — grooming, exploitation, and harmful content in digital environments; (4) Schools and institutional settings — peer-on-peer abuse, harmful dynamics within the school community itself.

Why is contextual safeguarding important for schools specifically?

Schools are uniquely positioned: they observe children's peer groups and social dynamics daily; they are themselves one of the four contexts of risk (peer-on-peer harm); and their observations are essential input to any contextual assessment led by children's services. Ofsted also now expects DSLs to understand their local contextual risk profile and to contribute actively to multi-agency responses to extra-familial harm.

What does Ofsted ask about contextual safeguarding?

Inspectors may ask DSLs what the specific contextual risks are in the school's area, how staff identify children at risk outside the home, how the school contributes to multi-agency assessments, and how the school addresses harmful peer dynamics and school-environment risks. Schools are not expected to replicate children's services work, but must demonstrate awareness and active multi-agency engagement.

Contextual Safeguarding: What It Is and How Schools Apply It