A Tutor's Safeguarding Duties: What the Law Actually Expects

If you tutor anyone under 18, safeguarding is part of your job, not an optional extra. In plain terms, your safeguarding duties are: get the right criminal-record check for working with children, know how to recognise when a child may be at risk, know exactly what to do if a child tells you something worrying, work in a way that keeps you and the child safe, and handle their personal information properly. You are not a school and you do not have a designated safeguarding lead down the corridor — as a self-employed tutor, you are your own first line of defence. This guide sets out what that means, what the law actually expects, and how doing it properly also makes you more trustworthy to the families you want to work with.

Why a private tutor carries these duties at all

A school has layers around safeguarding: a designated lead, written policies, staff training, and a chain of people to escalate to. A private tutor working one-to-one has none of that by default. It is just you and a child, often in a home or on a video call, with a parent trusting you to behave well and to notice if something is wrong. That trust is the whole basis of the work, and the responsibilities that come with it sit entirely on you.

Safeguarding is not one action. It runs across everything you do: the check you carry before you start, the way you set up a session, the boundaries you keep, how you respond if a child discloses something, and how you look after the data you collect. Treat it as a standing part of being a professional tutor, not a form you fill in once.

The good news is that none of it is mysterious. The framework used across England is set out in the Department for Education's statutory guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children and, for the school sector, Keeping Children Safe in Education. You are not legally bound by the school-facing guidance as a private individual, but it is the reference standard for what "good" looks like, and reading the summary of either is the single most useful hour you can spend before you take on younger students.

Your legal footing: the DBS check and "regulated activity"

Start with the criminal-record check, because it is the one duty with a clear legal shape.

Teaching or instructing children on a regular basis is what the law calls regulated activity — a category defined by the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 (as amended by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012). Private tuition of a child, done frequently, generally falls inside it. Regulated activity is the trigger for the highest level of criminal-record check and for a check against the children's barred list.

According to GOV.UK, there are three levels of check from the Disclosure and Barring Service:

• A Basic check shows unspent convictions only. You can apply for this yourself, but it tells a parent very little about your suitability to work with their child.
• A Standard check adds spent convictions, cautions and warnings.
• An Enhanced check, with the barred-list check, is the level intended for regulated activity with children. It includes relevant local police information and confirms you are not barred from working with under-18s.

For tutoring children, aim for the Enhanced level with the children's barred-list check. There is a catch worth knowing: according to GOV.UK, an individual can only apply for a Basic check on their own. A Standard or Enhanced check has to be requested through an organisation — an agency, a tutoring platform, or a registered umbrella body — because someone has to confirm the role is eligible and countersign the application. That is one practical reason self-employed tutors route their check through a platform rather than trying to arrange it alone. The companion guide, How to Get DBS-Checked as a Tutor, walks through the mechanics.

One more point on the certificate itself: it only reflects the day it was issued. Subscribing to the DBS Update Service when your certificate arrives keeps it current and lets a family check its status online with your permission, rather than relying on an ageing piece of paper.

How this becomes a visible credibility score on Tutorwise

Here is where the supply side gets an advantage most tutoring directories cannot offer. On most listing sites, your safeguarding claims are just words in a bio — a parent has no way to tell a genuine Enhanced DBS from a confident sentence. Tutorwise is built the other way round.

On Tutorwise your credibility is a computed score, not a self-written profile. It is built from real, checkable signals: your verified DBS and identity, your qualifications, the outcomes you actually deliver, and the reviews clients leave. You do not tell the platform you are trustworthy; the platform works it out from evidence and shows a family the result. A parent choosing between two tutors is not comparing two bios — they are comparing two earned scores.

Within that model, a verified DBS is the single highest-weighted trust signal you can hold. Identity verification and a completed onboarding add further weight. There is also a hard gate: you get no credibility score at all until you are identity-verified or your onboarding is complete, so the checks are not decoration — they are the entry ticket. In practice this means the safeguarding groundwork you are doing anyway does double duty. The Enhanced DBS you arrange to protect a child is also the thing that lifts how you rank and how readily a cautious new family picks you. Doing the right thing and being chosen point in the same direction.

That is the honest reason to treat safeguarding as an asset, not a chore. The effort is not just compliance you hope no one notices — it is the most valuable, least fakeable claim you can make, and on Tutorwise it is turned into a signal buyers can actually see.

The core duty: recognising and responding to concerns

A DBS check is a snapshot of your past. The live, ongoing part of safeguarding is paying attention during the work itself. Two skills matter most.

Recognising when a child may be at risk. Safeguarding guidance generally groups the signs into four broad categories of harm — physical, emotional, sexual, and neglect. You are not expected to diagnose anything or to investigate. You are expected to notice a change that does not sit right: an injury that is explained oddly, a child who becomes withdrawn or fearful, something a child says in passing, a comment about home that worries you. Your job is to notice and to pass it on to the right person, not to decide whether it is "serious enough".

Responding well if a child discloses something. This is the moment that matters, and it is worth rehearsing before it ever happens. If a child tells you something:

• Stay calm and listen. Let them speak in their own words; do not press for detail or ask leading questions.
• Do not promise to keep it secret. You can say you will help, and that you may need to tell someone whose job is to keep them safe.
• Write down what was said, in the child's words, as soon as you can afterwards — with the date and time.
• Report it. Do not sit on it.

Where you report depends on the situation. If a child is in immediate danger, call 999. Otherwise, your route is your local authority's children's social care team. If your concern is about the behaviour of an adult working with the child, that is a matter for the Local Authority Designated Officer (the LADO). If you are unsure and need to talk it through, the NSPCC runs a helpline for adults worried about a child on 0808 800 5000, and it is a named, trusted source for exactly this kind of judgement call. Knowing these routes before you need them is itself part of the duty.

Safeguarding online tuition — the part that is genuinely new

Most tutoring safeguarding advice was written for a tutor sitting at a kitchen table. A growing share of tuition now happens over video, and that changes the practical steps even though the underlying duty is identical. This is where a professional supply-side tutor separates from an amateur.

• Keep the setting appropriate. Sessions should happen in a shared or visible space, not a child's bedroom, with a parent aware the session is taking place and reachable.
• Keep contact on a professional channel. Arrange and conduct sessions through the platform or a professional account. Moving a child onto your personal WhatsApp, private DMs or personal phone number is exactly the pattern safeguarding guidance warns against — keep the relationship visible and on the record.
• Be transparent about recording. If a session is recorded, everyone should know, and you should have a clear reason and a clear way of storing it. Never record a child without the parent's knowledge.
• Involve the parent. For younger children especially, a parent being present or nearby is not interference — it is the safeguard, and confident tutors welcome it.

None of this is about suspicion. It is about keeping the work visible, which protects the child and protects you from any misunderstanding about how a session was run.

Handling a child's information properly

Safeguarding also covers the data you collect. As a tutor you will hold a child's name, contact details, school, progress notes and possibly more. Under UK data protection law you are responsible for handling that information lawfully — collecting only what you need, keeping it securely, and not sharing it with anyone who has no reason to see it. The Information Commissioner's Office publishes an Age Appropriate Design Code setting out the higher standard expected when a service is likely to be used by children; it is the right reference point if you are unsure. In practice, keep a child's records to what the tutoring actually needs, store them somewhere private, and delete them when the work ends.

The bottom line

Your safeguarding duties come down to a short, memorable list: get the right Enhanced DBS check, know the signs, know how to respond to a disclosure, keep the work visible and professional — online as well as in person — and look after the child's data. Do this because it is the job, first. But it is also the part of your professional reputation that a family cannot fake and cannot easily verify anywhere else — which is why, on a platform where credibility is a computed, evidence-based score rather than a self-written bio, the tutor who takes safeguarding seriously is also the tutor who gets chosen.

If you are setting up as a professional tutor, start with your Enhanced check and your verified profile, then read How to Get DBS-Checked as a Tutor and How to Find Your First Tutoring Clients. For the wider picture of building a reputation that wins repeat work, see Building Repeat Clients and Referrals as a Tutor.