Safeguarding Training Levels: The Children and Adult Frameworks Have Diverged

If your safeguarding training matrix says "Level 3: 8 hours" for both children and adults, half of it is now out of date.

The two intercollegiate documents that define safeguarding training levels in UK health care have diverged. The adult document, second edition 2024, still specifies hours per level. The children document was replaced in November 2025 and has dropped per-level hours entirely.

Any training plan or supplier quoting hours for children's safeguarding levels is working from the superseded 2019 edition.

Children and young people: the 2025 revision

The current document is the 2025 revision, Safeguarding children and young people and children and young people in care: Competencies for health care staff, published by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health on behalf of the intercollegiate steering group. It merges the 2019 fourth edition with the separate 2020 looked-after-children competencies, and it is published as a website rather than a PDF. An interim review is due in November 2028.

It is not statutory. It is professional consensus guidance that NHS England's assurance framework points providers towards.

The structure is five levels plus a sixth tier:

No hours are specified at any level. The 2019 edition gave hours and e-learning versus face-to-face proportions; the 2025 revision gives neither.

Three further rules from the document that matter more than the hours ever did. The revalidation cycle is defined as three to five years, and safeguarding competence should be considered at every cycle. Competence carries down: someone competent at Level 3 is assumed competent at Levels 1 and 2. And organisations should allocate levels by each staff member's actual level of contact with children and young people — the suggested staff groups are explicitly not binding.

That third point is the one to act on. If you have been assigning levels by job title, the document says to assign them by contact. A ward clerk on a paediatric ward and a ward clerk in geriatrics are not the same case.

Adults: the 2024 second edition, which does still have hours

The adult document is Adult Safeguarding: Roles and Competencies for Health Care Staff, second edition, published by the Royal College of Nursing on 29 July 2024 and last updated that September. It updates the 2018 first edition.

Note the "at least 50% participatory" condition at Levels 3, 4 and 5. That is the detail most often missed when organisations move safeguarding training to e-learning for cost reasons: for those levels, half of it cannot be e-learning.

And note who sits at Level 1: catering, domestic, maintenance, porters, transport — and board members. Which lines up with the national role descriptions for those posts, as we cover in our guide to the Care Workforce Pathway supporting roles.

Why the divergence matters practically

Most organisations run one safeguarding training plan covering both children and adults, with a single set of hours against each level. That is no longer possible to do accurately.

For adults you have suggested hours and a participatory proportion you can audit against. For children you have competencies, a contact-based allocation rule and a refresher tied to appraisal and revalidation — and no hours to count.

If your supplier is selling you an eight-hour Level 3 children's safeguarding course on the basis that the intercollegiate document requires it, the document no longer says that. The course may still be the right thing to buy; the justification has changed.

The honest way to build the plan now is: adults by hours, children by competence and contact, both reviewed at appraisal. And record which framework and edition you used, because this is the second time in six years the children's document has changed shape.

Neither document is law

Worth being clear, because these frameworks are often presented as statutory. Both are professional consensus guidance. The statutory duties sit elsewhere: for adults, in the Care Act 2014 and its statutory guidance; for children, in the Children Acts and Working Together. Our guide to safeguarding children for health and care staff covers that framework, and our guide to Making Safeguarding Personal covers the principle that should shape how adult enquiries are actually conducted.

The practical consequence of "not statutory" is not that you can ignore it. It is that the level framework is evidence of what good looks like, and an inspector will ask how you decided which staff sit where — which is exactly the question the 2025 children's document now puts on you rather than answering for you.

What to do

Four things. Re-badge your children's safeguarding levels against the 2025 competencies and delete the hours. Keep the adult hours and check you are meeting the 50 per cent participatory condition at Levels 3 and above. Reallocate levels by actual contact rather than job title, and write down the reasoning. And check your Level 1 list actually includes catering, domestic, maintenance and your board — because on the adult framework it should.

On frequency more generally, the three-year adult cycle and the appraisal-linked children's cycle are both framework conventions rather than legal intervals, which is the pattern across almost all mandatory training. We set out where the legal duty actually sits in our guide to how often mandatory training is really required.