The Girls' Day School Trust is the largest group of independent schools in the UK, comprising 25 schools across England and Wales, from Newcastle to Portsmouth, educating 20,000 girls aged three to 18. At the heart of the Trust's approach to safeguarding is Mary Sansom, Compliance and Pastoral Manager at the central Trust Office, whose role is to support schools in ensuring that they meet the highest standards of safeguarding practice and regulatory compliance.

When GDST began looking for a new provider to deliver DSL Level 3 training across its schools, the requirements were clear: knowledgeable, authoritative and genuinely able to tailor training to the specific context of an all-girls independent school trust. After exploring various options, Mary was recommended Independent Safeguarding Service (ISS) by a colleague who had experience of working with the team. She got in touch with Nick Pratt, a qualified social worker and strategic lead of Independent Safeguarding Service with over 20 years in statutory child protection, to discuss what ISS could provide.

Three years on, the partnership continues to grow.

GDST's arrangement with Independent Safeguarding Service is deliberately bespoke. Rather than a standard package, the Trust works with ISS to draw on the elements that deliver the most value for their specific context: DSL Level 3 training across all 25 schools and a comprehensive programme of safeguarding audits. More recently, GDST staff have also begun accessing ISS's wider training programme. Because GDST operates with its own policies and frameworks across the network, ISS works around those, strengthening what is already in place rather than replacing it.

Having training and audit delivered by the same provider has created something that Mary describes as genuinely valuable: observations from audits can directly inform training, making the whole offer responsive to what GDST's schools are actually experiencing on the ground.

What sets the ISS audit process apart, Mary explains, is that it goes well beyond a regulatory checklist.

Schools across the Trust have grown to trust the auditors, and there is a genuine sense that difficult questions can be raised and worked through in a spirit of support. Nick Pratt in particular goes beyond what would typically be expected, offering expert advice on multi-agency working and helping schools navigate complex relationships with local authorities when particularly challenging situations arise.

A recent staff survey asked GDST colleagues to describe their experience of the ISS audit process. Their responses were consistent: thorough, rigorous, expert, supportive, really useful.