What I Heard at ISPCAN: Three Things Worth Changing Before Fall Training
Earlier this week, I presented a poster at the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN)‘s 2026 World Congress, three days of sessions with people doing child protection work in dozens of countries. A few themes kept surfacing no matter who was presenting or where they worked.
The first is one I think about often: having a safeguarding policy does not mean your staff actually use it in the moment. Presenters described very different settings, national training programs, individual schools, community groups. All of them landed on the same finding. Staff usually know the policy exists. What they lack is confidence to apply it to a messy, real situation that does not match the training example exactly.
One project working across several countries on online abuse found something I found reassuring. Frontline workers often assumed online harm needed special technical expertise they did not have. But the underlying safeguarding skills for online harm are the same ones staff already use offline. The fix is not more technical training. It is helping staff trust the judgment they already have.
Second: several presenters treated a rise in reported concerns as a genuinely good sign. More than one program described strengthening its safeguarding culture and then seeing more concerns get reported, framing that as a shift from silence to vigilance, not a crisis. In my experience, a lot of administrators panic when incident numbers climb. Consider that it might mean staff trust the system enough to use it.
Third: peer support beats one-time training for making anything stick. More than one session pointed to structured peer consultation, small groups that keep meeting after formal training ends to talk through real cases, as the thing that actually changes behavior long term. A single training day gives people information. Regular peer conversation gives them practice.
We also presented a poster at this congress on just culture, building on our own writing about how organizations should respond when staff make mistakes.
These three shifts are worth planning for now, before your fall training season starts:
- Build staff confidence in applying judgment to gray-area situations, not just memorizing policy language.
- Treat a rise in reported concerns as a sign your reporting culture is working, not a sign something has gone wrong.
- Set up a recurring peer group after training ends, not just a training event.
If you want help building that kind of safety culture, our online course on building a safety culture walks through exactly this process.
