This piece discusses child abuse. Sit with it at your own pace

Two cases have been sitting heavy with us. 

Both are high-profile, both are recent, and both involve serious abuse in nursery settings, one in London and one in Bristol. In both, reporting is clear that people raised concerns about an adult’s behaviour before the full scale of harm was known.

Working with children and young people, we cannot be neutral observers. These reports land differently when we’ve held a register and watched a room settle. When we’ve written a chronology late at night, trying to translate a child’s reality into something a system will accept. Then sat in safeguarding meetings with a stomach like stone, listening to adults weigh up risk, evidence, process, and what can be “proved”. When we see outcomes like this the question people always ask: Were there signs? 

Here is the harder question when we hear heartbreaking examples of significant harm caused to children. What if people did notice, and what they noticed got put into a category that sounded small enough to tolerate?

What “low-level concerns” are supposed to mean

Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) does not treat low-level concerns as a nice-to-have. It places them inside the spine of a safeguarding culture.

KCSIE is explicit that a staff behaviour policy should include low-level concerns. It links this to wider expectations about professional boundaries, staff and pupil relationships, and communications including social media.

The KCSIE goes further and spells out what good practice looks like. It says staff must share low-level concerns responsibly with the right person, record them, and deal with them appropriately. It frames the purpose as creating and embedding “a culture of openness, trust and transparency”.

The NSPCC echoes the same logic, describing low-level concerns as worries about adult behaviour that conflicts with organisational standards and values, even when it does not meet the harm threshold, 

So, on paper, the intent is clear.

The problem with the word “low”

In practice, it is worth reflecting on what the word “low” is doing. It’s tempting to let it become the category for things that feel uncomfortable but not urgent: things that don’t fit neatly into a referral, things someone could misread, things that would cause friction if you named them.

A colleague is “a bit mean”. The tone is “off”. Someone is “too familiar”. A child says “I don’t like being with them”. A staff member humiliates children, but it is “just their style”. Another adult shouts at a child they were just centimetres away from; in a way that makes your body tighten; the feeling gets swallowed because we all have bad days and nobody wants to be the one who makes it heavier. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: sometimes that swallowing is framed as loyalty. We tell ourselves we are “not undermining” a colleague, because we know how fragile the room can feel, and how quickly a crack between adults can turn into instability. How many times have you heard that being a good team means “having each other’s backs”, and so we hold the line. We stay united. Staff are holding a system together with the last threads of their energy. So the unspoken rule becomes: do not undermine each other. Do not crack the monolith of “teacher”. We move on. Not because we think it is fine, but because we are trying to keep things steady.

Low-level concerns were designed to interrupt that pattern. But the language can also protect the very culture it was meant to challenge.

Minimisation as a system, not a personal failing

This isn’t about some ‘bad people’ doing nothing. It is about the systemic challenge of institutions conditioning adults and young people into minimisation, and providing adults in school with seemingly legitimate reasons to do it. The word ‘low’ helps. ‘Low’ has the same minimising effect as ‘micro’ does when we say microaggressions. It shrinks what is happening until it feels manageable, ignorable, and ultimately becomes acceptable. To interrupt this pattern, what happens if we refuse the minimising language and instead name what they are: Cumulative Harm Indicators or Boundary Violations? 

School harms are a lesser category of harm?

Vincent Vega asks Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction a seemingly trivial question “Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?” A mundane chat that belies the violence in their work. I want to ask, “Do you know what they call verbal abuse in schools?” The point isn’t shock value; it’s that the answer tells the truth about what adults have been conditioned to accept and normalise within schools.

There’s a nefarious undertone to how we understand harm at home versus how we understand it in education. The quiet, prevailing belief is that ‘Real harm happens at home; school is where we spot it.’ Nobody always says this outright, but isn’t there something insidious about what we tolerate, depending on where it takes place? Thresholds and procedures feel built entirely around managing family risk, while we implicitly treat institutional risk as far more rare. In everyday conversation, we frame the dangers as being ‘out there,’ while we frame the school as the safe place. That is why the ‘Universal’ level of the safeguarding threshold determines that universal services, which include schools, meet the needs of children and young people. But the reality is more uncomfortable.

If a child experiences humiliation day after day at home, there is language for it: emotional abuse, harm, risk. If a child experiences regular humiliation day after day at school, the language for that is, “high expectations”? The naming of Low-level concerns expose a double standard.     

The Class 13 Lens on Safeguarding

We are an education equity charity. That matters here because equity work changes what becomes visible. You can change the world once you name the world; we have to shift from compliance based work to values based work.

For Class 13, this means continuing to share our thoughts and reflections through our lens and have critical conversations about the wider implications of low-level concerns. 

We know that much safeguarding training focuses, rightly, on indicators, referrals, and thresholds. Those things matter. But they can also keep the gaze pointed outwards, towards the home, towards the community, towards the “risk factors” in families. We know that the desire for social capital and the illusion of institutional unity often create a monolith of adult solidarity. Addressing these concerns threatens that monolith, not because it is “anti-staff,” but because it fundamentally refuses the idea that adult comfort matters more than children’s safety.

When ‘high expectations’ becomes a climate of fear

The Mossbourne Victoria Park LCSPR highlights a critical transition point where “high expectations” discipline devolves into a “climate of fear” through verbal misconduct. When staff engage in face-to-face shouting, public shaming, or dehumanizing language, such as telling a child “You are nothing”, it goes beyond managing a classroom; they are utilising Intimidation and Emotional Abuse.

The impact on the child is profound: it triggers a persistent state of “hyper-vigilance” that shuts down the brain’s capacity for high-level learning and replaces it with a survival instinct. This often results in children becoming too terrified to voice basic needs, such as requesting a toilet  break, or viewing the school, supposedly a Universal “Safe” Service as a source of threat rather than support. By framing these behaviors as “low-level concerns,” we often minimise the reality of the psychological cost for the child and scale of impact. 

bell hooks can be a necessary grounding in all of this; she teaches us that love is not soft, but a rigorous practice. “To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling…” (bell hooks, All About Love). A safeguarding culture worthy of the name demands the strength to hold that truth telling, especially when that truth is awkward, inconvenient, or normalised.

Moving Beyond the Statutory Baseline

Equity work continues to return to the questions, what is the system doing to children, and how is it making that harm feel normal? While KCSIE gives the statutory baseline, the real work is what we build on top of it. A serious culture around these concerns benefits from reflection that is not performative, not defensive, and not rushed. These are the reflective questions KCSIE does not ask, but schools need to answer:

• In this setting, who feels safest raising a concern, and who feels most at risk?
• When a child says “They always shout at me,” “They hate me,” or “They said they were counting down the minutes until they could send me out,” is your first instinct to hear them, or is it cross-examination?
• What behaviors do we reward because they produce compliance?
• If we treat these concerns as a map of culture rather than a list of individual problems, what patterns become visible?

These questions do not need public answers. They do need honest ones. Because these concerns are not about catching “bad people”; they are about refusing to let harm become routine.

Because low-level concerns are not about catching “bad people”. They are about refusing to let harm become routine.

Closing Thoughts 

The cases we refer to provide a devastating reminder of a truth, that the most severe harm rarely announces itself with a roar and in a silo. Instead, it arrives in the slightly off moments, the gut feeling you can’t quite name, the subtle boundary crossing, or the pattern of behavior dismissed because it didn’t quite meet a formal threshold.

If we allow “low-level concern” to remain a soothing category, the conditions for harm will remain intact, hiding in plain sight right beside or within our safeguarding policy.

We must be clear: Low-level is not low-impact for children. When we minimise these interactions, we ignore the reality that for the child, the weight of the experience is often transformative and damaging.

When we witness harmful interactions, does reframing “low-level” to “Indicators of Systemic Risk” or “Adult Boundary Concerns” help to affirm the realities for children. This change in naming is not semantic; it refocuses the gaze away from a “small” individual problem toward the systemic challenges it truly represents within the setting.

We aren’t here for comfort. We are here for clarity, time to pause and for the urgent reminder that recognising what is happening is a professional responsibility, not a personality trait and we are here to support you in that work. 
If you want more writing like this and want to stay updated on future safeguarding training that ensures all statutory safeguarding requirements are fully covered; providing your team with the essential legal and procedural foundations; but applies a critical equity lens (the kind of space schools rarely get the opportunity to sit with), please join our Class 13 Mailing List.