Since 1 September, supervision has ceased to remove otherwise qualifying work with children from regulated activity. The change sounds technical, but its consequences are substantial: roles previously excluded from Children’s Barred List checking may now fall within the full safeguarding regime, including the prohibitions on barred persons undertaking regulated activity and, where the statutory conditions are met, the associated referral duties. Schools, churches, sports clubs, drama groups, charities and youth organisations should be checking whether roles classified before September are still classified correctly.
On 1 September, one of the more consequential changes to child safeguarding in recent years came into force with remarkably little public attention. For fourteen years, an adult regularly teaching, training, instructing, caring for or supervising children could in certain circumstances remain outside the statutory definition of regulated activity because another person provided sufficient day-to-day supervision. That exemption has now gone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Where the other statutory conditions are satisfied, supervision no longer prevents the activity from being regulated activity.¹
The distinction matters because this is not a general instruction that every adult who encounters a child must undergo the highest level of DBS checking. Occasional assistance remains occasional assistance, and different categories of regulated activity have different statutory conditions. For the teaching, training, instructing, caring and supervising activities principally affected by this reform, the relevant period condition includes activity on more than three days in any thirty-day period or qualifying overnight activity. A parent helping once at a school fête has not suddenly become a regulated worker; a parent listening to children read every Monday may be in a very different position.²
The Government’s own examples make the practical reach of the change clear. Weekly reading volunteers, assistant sports coaches, workers at outdoor activity centres and people helping regularly in youth organisations, charities and community groups can now fall within regulated activity even where another vetted adult remains present. DBS has expressly warned that the reform is not confined to education and does not concern volunteers alone. Paid and unpaid roles in sports, charities, youth work, outdoor activities and cultural organisations may all be affected where the nature and frequency of the work satisfy the statutory tests.²
Churches and voluntary organisations should therefore resist the temptation to assume that this is somebody else’s education regulation. A catechist teaching children every week, an adult regularly assisting at a parish youth group, a theatre practitioner repeatedly training young performers or a volunteer regularly supervising children at a club may require reassessment. The question is no longer whether another responsible adult is standing nearby. It is what the person actually does, how frequently it is done, and whether the statutory conditions for regulated activity are met.
There is a further complication which illustrates why organisations should review actual patterns of activity rather than simply their own rotas. Department for Education guidance explains that qualifying activity can accumulate across different settings. A volunteer working with children on four days in a month can meet the period condition even where each of those days is spent in a different school. The legal concern is the person’s regular child-facing activity, not the administrative convenience of treating each institution in isolation.³
The importance of the reform becomes much clearer when one asks what the old supervision exemption actually did. Before 1 September, an otherwise qualifying supervised role could remain outside regulated activity. An organisation might still obtain an enhanced DBS certificate where the role was eligible, but it could not obtain Children’s Barred List information on the basis of that supervised role. The law could therefore place an adult in regular and close contact with children while denying the organisation access to the information showing that the state had already barred that person from regulated work with them.¹
The anomaly went considerably further than access to information. The explanatory notes to the Crime and Policing Act 2026 state that, while such supervised roles remained outside regulated activity, a person on the Children’s Barred List did not commit the barred-person offence merely by undertaking that role, and an organisation did not commit the corresponding offence merely by engaging the barred person in it. If an employer removed somebody from such a supervised role because he had harmed a child or posed a risk of harm, the mandatory referral duty applying to regulated activity providers did not arise merely from that role. The effect was that supervision altered not merely the level of checking available, but significant parts of the legal safeguarding architecture surrounding the person concerned.¹
That arrangement was the product of a deliberate policy choice rather than an accidental drafting error. The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 narrowed regulated activity amid concerns that vetting had become disproportionate and that ordinary voluntary involvement with children was being over-regulated. The concern was not frivolous: a safeguarding system which treats every fleeting contact as presenting the same risk eventually substitutes bureaucracy for judgment. The problem was that the supervision exemption answered the wrong question. It concentrated heavily upon the opportunity to abuse a child while another adult was physically present and insufficiently upon what repeated legitimate access to children could make possible beyond the supervised encounter.
Simon Bailey’s independent review of the disclosure and barring regime identified that weakness directly. Supervision may restrict what somebody can do in the room, but it cannot prevent a person using repeated contact to establish trust or relationships which can later be exploited elsewhere. Bailey therefore recommended removing the exemption, and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reached the same conclusion. IICSA’s ninth recommendation called for those engaging people to work or volunteer frequently with children to be able to discover whether they were barred even where the work was supervised.⁴ ⁵
Sections 139 and 140 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 now give effect to that principle in England and Wales and Northern Ireland respectively. The result is not that every affected organisation automatically has an identical statutory duty to obtain a fresh DBS certificate. DBS has specifically cautioned against that interpretation. The legislative change alters what constitutes regulated activity and therefore changes eligibility for Children’s Barred List checking and the legal consequences attached to regulated activity; the precise checking obligation then depends upon the statutory and sector-specific regime governing the organisation.¹ ²
Schools, colleges and childcare settings in England have the clearest immediate obligation. Department for Education guidance states that volunteers who now engage in regulated activity need an enhanced DBS check containing Children’s Barred List information, and schools and colleges must ensure that a volunteer brought within regulated activity by the change is not barred from working with children. The same guidance distinguishes those frequent roles from occasional volunteering and makes clear that an occasional parent helping with a day trip or PTA event is not brought into regulated activity merely by the abolition of the supervision exemption.³
For churches, charities, clubs and other voluntary organisations, the correct response is neither complacency nor indiscriminate checking. It is review. DBS advises organisations to identify roles involving teaching, training, instructing, caring for or supervising children which were previously regarded as outside regulated activity because of supervision; examine whether the frequency or overnight criteria are met; check whether existing DBS certificates included Children’s Barred List information; determine the appropriate check under the relevant sector guidance; and update recruitment, volunteering and safeguarding arrangements accordingly. A policy drafted in August may therefore describe August’s law perfectly accurately while classifying a role wrongly in September.²
The reform came into force on the same day as Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, but the two should not be conflated. KCSIE is statutory safeguarding guidance applying to schools and colleges in England; removal of the supervision exemption is a change to the statutory definition of regulated activity. They are legally distinct. Their coincidence nevertheless points in the same practical direction: safeguarding depends upon relevant information reaching those charged with making decisions about children’s safety and upon those people understanding that responsibility cannot simply be presumed to belong to somebody else.⁶
Nuntiatoria addressed that larger problem only days ago in The Information was there: Why England’s New Safeguarding Duty Comes After Decades of Institutional Failure. The central argument was not that Britain invariably suffers from a shortage of safeguarding information. Again and again, fragments already existed within police forces, councils, schools, health services or other agencies. What failed was the movement from information to understanding, and from understanding to intervention. The existence of another procedure or another database is of little comfort to a child if the people receiving the warning do not recognise its significance or decline to act upon it.⁷
That is the necessary caution when considering the DBS reform. A barred-list check is valuable because it supplies information which may prevent somebody already judged unsuitable from obtaining regulated access to children. It does not certify character. A clear certificate cannot show that an individual who has never come to official attention is safe, and no national database can replace references, induction, appropriate boundaries, competent supervision, proper recording, professional curiosity and the willingness to raise concerns about somebody who is popular, useful or trusted. Nor has supervision ceased to matter as a safeguarding practice: what Parliament has removed is supervision as an exemption from regulated activity, not supervision as an ordinary means of protecting children.
The events of this same month make the distinction unusually stark. Lady Justice Thirlwall’s report into the failures surrounding the deaths and collapses of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital was published on 15 September. The circumstances are profoundly different from DBS checking and should not be collapsed into the same case, but the institutional lesson is painfully familiar. The Inquiry found dysfunctional management and governance, a gulf between clinicians and hospital leadership, and a failure to understand the fundamentals of safeguarding. Safeguarding action was required when deliberate harm by a member of staff was suspected; certainty of guilt was not the threshold. The procedures existed, but suspicion was not converted into effective safeguarding action.⁸
Nuntiatoria has found the same structural problem in very different settings. Safeguarding Outside the Law examined the extraordinary spectacle of local authorities spending more than £125 million a year placing vulnerable children in unregistered provision while operating within a national system rich in regulation and oversight. Our earlier reporting in Seven years, £200 million, and still no action: Maggie Oliver takes the government to court and Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Courts, Citizens, and the Fight for Truth returned to the failure which has haunted Rotherham, Rochdale and other inquiries: institutions can possess warnings, powers and procedures and still leave children unprotected when responsibility becomes fragmented, inconvenient or institutionally uncomfortable.⁹ ¹⁰
September’s DBS reform matters because it removes one unnecessary obstruction to knowledge. Until 31 August, the law could treat somebody as working closely and frequently enough with children that his activity would ordinarily have been regulated, maintain a statutory list of people barred because they presented a safeguarding risk, yet prevent the organisation from consulting that list on the basis of the supervised role. It could also leave that role outside the barred-person and employer prohibitions attached to regulated activity and outside the referral duty which regulated activity providers must observe when its conditions are met. That position has now ended.¹
Responsible organisations should consequently review the roles they classified under the pre-September regime, but the exercise must not be allowed to collapse into a paper chase. Schools may need to review single central records; charities and churches may need to reassess volunteer roles; clubs and cultural organisations may need to reconsider who qualifies for barred-list checking and what their sector-specific duties require. Those are worthwhile measures because they can prevent somebody known to present a risk from gaining regular access to children. They become hollow only when completion of the administrative exercise is mistaken for safeguarding itself.
Britain has become exceptionally accomplished at constructing safeguarding architecture after catastrophe. The more difficult achievement is making institutions use it before another catastrophe occurs. The abolition of the supervision exemption closes a genuine gap and gives organisations access to information which the old system could withhold from them. Every organisation regularly placing adults with children should establish whether any role changed legal character on 1 September. Having done that, it should ask the question which no statute, certificate or safeguarding policy can answer on its behalf: when the information reaches us, are we prepared to act upon it?
¹ UK Parliament, Crime and Policing Act 2026: Explanatory Notes, sections 139–140. Crime and Policing Act 2026: Explanatory Notes
² Disclosure and Barring Service, Change to the definition of regulated activity with children from 1 September 2026; Regulated activity with children: myth busting the September 2026 Supervision Exemption changes. Change to the definition of regulated activity with children from 1 September 2026 Regulated activity with children: myth busting the September 2026 Supervision Exemption changes
³ Department for Education, Regulated activity: removal of the supervision exemption (comes into force 1 September 2026). Regulated activity: removal of the supervision exemption
⁴ Simon Bailey CBE QPM, Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Regime, Home Office and Disclosure and Barring Service. Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Regime
⁵ Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Recommendation 9. IICSA Final Report — Part K and Annexes
⁶ Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026. Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026
⁷ Nuntiatoria, The Information was there: Why England’s New Safeguarding Duty Comes After Decades of Institutional Failure, 11 September 2026. The Information was there: Why England’s New Safeguarding Duty Comes After Decades of Institutional Failure
⁸ The Thirlwall Inquiry, Inquiry Report finds profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding, 15 September 2026. Inquiry Report finds profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding
⁹ Nuntiatoria, Safeguarding Outside the Law, 11 September 2026. Safeguarding Outside the Law
¹⁰ Nuntiatoria, Seven years, £200 million, and still no action: Maggie Oliver takes the government to court, 4 March 2026; Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Courts, Citizens, and the Fight for Truth, 5 March 2026. Seven years, £200 million, and still no action: Maggie Oliver takes the government to court Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Courts, Citizens, and the Fight for Truth
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