• The Department for Education has expanded its guidance on artificial intelligence in schools, adding new modules and significantly strengthening the safeguarding material. Produced with the Chiltern Learning Trust and the Chartered College of Teaching, the updated resources now cover areas such as SEND provision, school operations, and a much broader treatment of safeguarding concerns.

• A major addition is the explicit recognition of cognitive offloading as a safeguarding issue. The guidance warns that when pupils rely on AI to think for them, it can reduce their willingness to seek help from real people. This isn’t only a teaching problem; it creates conditions where important disclosures may never reach a trusted adult. The update also highlights the risks of pupils forming emotional attachments to AI chatbots. Some tools are intentionally designed to encourage this, and for vulnerable children it can displace real relationships and undermine the human contact that effective safeguarding depends on.

• Existing warnings about deepfakes, AI‑generated child sexual abuse imagery, grooming through avatars or chatbots, and AI‑assisted extremist content remain in place and have been reinforced. The guidance makes clear that the government’s rules on incidents involving nudes and semi‑nudes apply equally to AI‑generated sexualised deepfakes.

• The legal landscape has also shifted. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 has now become law, introducing offences related to creating, adapting, supplying, or offering nudification tools—AI systems that digitally remove clothing from images of real people. This is the first time the tools themselves, not just the resulting images, have been criminalised. The offences are not yet enforceable, and even once they are, the tools will not simply disappear. Research from 2026 showed that Apple and Google Play had dozens of nudification apps between them, with hundreds of millions of downloads and significant revenue, and although platforms removed apps when alerted, new ones quickly emerged. The new law applies only to apps, leaving browser‑based nudification services untouched.

• Safeguarding risks remain very real. Smoothwall’s 2026 research found that more than a quarter of educators had encountered pupils using AI to create sexualised or abusive imagery, and nearly one in ten had dealt with a student producing a fake explicit image of a peer. Legal progress is welcome, but schools still face an active and ongoing risk that requires clear policies, staff training, and pupil education.

• The DfE is clear that child protection and online safety policies must now reflect AI‑specific risks, including deepfakes and AI‑generated imagery. Filtering and monitoring systems must be reviewed annually, and those reviews must explicitly consider AI use. Leaders are also advised to check whether any mental‑health‑related apps or online tools used with pupils are regulated by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—something many schools may not yet have considered.

• All updated materials, including four staff modules and a leadership toolkit, are freely available. Module 3, which focuses on safe use, is recommended for all staff. The leadership toolkit is intended to be worked through collaboratively as part of strategic planning rather than read once and set aside.

Please click here to view the full guidance here:

Source: Source: GOV.UK — Department for Education

Education settings are being encouraged to review how they use and publish children’s images online following the release of new guidance from the UK Safer Internet Centre.

The new guidance, Image guidance for education settings, provides practical advice to help organisations assess and reduce safeguarding risks associated with sharing photographs and videos of children online.

While the guidance is non-statutory, it reflects an increasingly urgent safeguarding issue that all organisations working with children should consider.

The publication comes amid growing concern about the misuse of publicly available images, particularly as artificial intelligence tools make it easier to manipulate innocent photographs into exploitative or harmful content.

Recent reporting in The Guardian highlighted how some schools are reconsidering the publication of pupil images online following concerns over AI-generated abuse imagery, sextortion threats and the wider misuse of children’s photographs.

For safeguarding professionals, this represents a significant shift in digital risk.

Practices that may once have been seen as routine—celebration galleries, public event photos, promotional materials and social media content—now require more robust safeguarding scrutiny.

The UK Safer Internet Centre guidance encourages education settings to consider:

• whether publicly sharing children’s images remains necessary;
• how identifiable children may be through associated names, uniforms, locations or contextual details;
• whether secure alternatives, such as parent-only portals, are more appropriate;
• how consent is obtained, recorded and reviewed;
• whether staff understand the safeguarding implications of image sharing;
• how organisations would respond if images were misused.

Although the guidance is written for education settings, the safeguarding principles are relevant to any organisation working with children and young people.

Designated Safeguarding Leads, headteachers, governors, trustees and senior leaders may wish to review existing communications, marketing and safeguarding policies in light of the changing digital threat landscape.

This is not about creating unnecessary fear around photography or school communications. It is about recognising that the context in which children’s images are shared has changed significantly.

Good safeguarding practice requires organisations to assess risk in light of current threats—not historical assumptions.

The full guidance from the UK Safer Internet Centre can be accessed here:
https://saferinternet.org.uk/guide-and-resource/image-guidance-for-education-settings

Youth warnings, reprimands and cautions will no longer be automatically disclosed to employers who require Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificates from 28 November.

The changes, which come as a result of a Supreme Court judgment that found some elements of the existing filtering rules for Standard and Enhanced DBS checks were disproportionate, are intended to make it easier for people with certain convictions to find employment.

A county lines drug gang forced 40 children to deal cannabis and cocaine at a single school.

The teens, some as young as 14, had been supplied with drugs and dealing kits including deal bags and scales. 

Police say grown-up dealers had a network of 40 pupils dealing at the school which has just over 1,200 pupils - meaning one in thirty was possibly selling drugs.

It is suspected that girls as young as 14 at Kingsdown School in Swindon, Wiltshire, have been pestered for sex in exchange for cocaine.

And the dawn police raid yesterday - on the eve of GCSE results - revealed the extent of the teens coerced into the operation.

Wiltshire Police arrested a 27-year-old man during the raid. He has since been released under investigation.

Sgt Nathan Perry, who planned the 7am raid, said: "We found the person we're looking for, we've managed to safeguard the children who were at risk and we've found drugs.

"We all know about county lines and the risks associated with that.

"The difficulty with this type of drugs operation is that it's specifically targeting very young children in order to get them to deal drugs.

"Some of the information we've been passed is that children are not only being coerced into this activity, but they're also being physically threatened.

"If they go to police or teachers they'll be harmed," he added. 

Police were said to have been alerted to the gang at Kingsdown School.

A pair of older teen boys, both 16, are believed to have been supplying a network of up to 40 children in their mid-teens at the Swindon school.

The 27-year-old was arrested during the morning raid on suspicion of possession of class B drugs with intent to supply and inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

The raid came as Swindon police focused their sights on modern slavery.

Nationally, police have increasingly turned to modern slavery laws to target drug dealers who force children and vulnerable adults to peddle their product.

Sgt Perry said those convicted could expect sentences of up to 15 years imprisonment.

"You've got children being exploited and young kids being forced to run the drugs. We will take it seriously," he said.

"The sheer nature of the exploitation of these young people is unacceptable.

"If we don't do something to stop that they're potentially going to be at risk for the rest of their lives.