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Every day new threats seem to emerge around child protection. To reflect this the Government have increased the legal safeguarding duties for schools and teachers.
The year ahead is full of challenges for schools trying to keep children safe.
In the great flurry over counter-terrorism in schools, the continuing news of more historical child abuse cases, and the pressure to deal with community abuse, such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage, it will be easy to lose focus on the day to day - and that's without all the other changes that will be distracting schools and teachers.
The new government has promised to introduce mandatory child protection reporting legislation. This may mean that by the end of the year headteachers, and possibly others, will be facing jail if they have failed to report child abuse. What is not clear is whether this will include concerns, suspicions or actual knowledge.
With one in five heads reporting that they had to wait longer than 45 days to get a response from children's social care, will the system be able to cope with people protecting themselves by reporting everything?
Perception and judgment will continue to be key.
For example, the police in several child sexual exploitation cases apparently classified the girls involved into a category of 'child prostitute' while their social workers used the category of 'lifestyle choice’.
One judge might ask 'what is the world coming to?' when she is called on to deal with 'two teenagers getting drunk and having sex' because one was under 16, while another judge may have to deal with another teenager accused of 'putting an indecent image of a child online' when he send his girlfriend's explicit photo to a friend.
Schools need to help young people to navigate their way through these contradictory attitudes.
Meanwhile we still have to make sure that staff are safe to work with children and that there is a culture of safeguarding within school. We also have to deal with the worrying fact that teachers are apparently three times less likely to notice bullying than children.
What is more worrying is the recent evidence that seems to show that bullying by peers is more likely to lead to serious psychiatric disorder than maltreatment in the home.
Keeping children safe is a duty that applies to every kind of school. In time of constant change in education the need for key staff in schools to have a clear knowledge and understanding of child protection issues and legislation has never been greater.
Richard Bird will be speaking at the upcoming 11th annual Child Protection in Education conferences in both London and Manchester.
