There is a lot in the 2026 update to Keeping Children Safe in Education, and most of the coverage has focused on volunteers and reading helpers. That matters. But there is a quieter line in the guidance that speaks directly to anyone who runs a governing board, and it is worth pulling out before the new term starts.
From 1 September, your single central record has to show the safeguarding checks for governors, not just staff. Dated, evidenced, and ready for inspection at any time. If your board has treated governor appointments as a slightly informal affair, this is the moment that changes.
What actually changes on 1 September
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 comes into force on 1 September 2026. The headline change, driven by the Crime and Policing Act 2026 and a recommendation from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, is the removal of the supervision exemption for volunteers.
Until now, a volunteer working under the supervision of a member of staff could be treated as not being in regulated activity, which meant a lighter set of checks. That exemption has gone. From September, any volunteer teaching, training, instructing or supervising children on more than three days in a thirty day period, or overnight, is in regulated activity and needs an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check with barred list information before they start.
Alongside that, the guidance is explicit about the single central record. The SCR now has to record evidence that the required checks have been completed for every person working in a school. That list includes staff, supply teachers, trainee teachers, volunteers, contractors and governors. For each one it needs the date the check was done, who did it, and evidence that it was satisfactory. It has to be kept up to date and available for inspection at any time. In a multi-academy trust, it has to be maintained for each academy.
Why this reaches your governor elections
You might be thinking this is a job for the safeguarding lead, not the clerk. Mostly it is. But it changes the paperwork around every new governor who joins your board this term, and autumn is when most boards take on new parent and staff governors.
When a parent governor is elected in September or October, that person becomes someone whose record now sits on the SCR under inspection-ready conditions. The appointment is no longer a line in the minutes and a welcome email. It is the start of a documented trail: how they were nominated, how they were elected, when they joined, and what was checked. Inspectors, trustees and your own auditors can ask to see any part of that at any time.
So the quality of your election process matters more than it used to. A parent governor election run on paper slips counted in a back office leaves you with very little you can show. An election with a clear record of who stood, who was eligible to vote, how the ballot ran and what the result was gives you the first clean entry in that trail before the safeguarding checks even begin.
An election is not just how you fill a seat. It is the first piece of evidence that the person in it belongs there.
The direction of travel is evidence on demand
Step back from the detail and the pattern is clear. Over the last couple of years, almost every change to school governance has pushed in the same direction. It is no longer enough to do the right thing, you have to be able to prove you did it, on the day someone asks.
Trust inspections, the updated governance guides, the academy trust handbook, and now KCSIE all point the same way. Boards are being asked to hold records that are complete, dated and available without a scramble. The schools that find this easy are the ones that already treat their governance processes as things that produce evidence, not just results.
That is the shift I would encourage any board to make. Do not think of your governor election as an event that happens and then disappears. Think of it as something that should leave behind a record you would be comfortable handing to an inspector without editing it first.
What I would sort before term starts
A few practical things are worth doing in the next few weeks.
Brief your board. Governors, trustees and anyone involved in recruitment need to understand that the checks have changed and that they now appear on the SCR in their own right. This is the DfE's own advice, and it takes ten minutes at the first meeting of the year.
Audit your current volunteers and reassess whether any of them now fall into regulated activity under the new threshold. Where they do, the barred list status needs checking, and the guidance expects that to be done before September.
And look at how you run governor elections. If your current method leaves you without a clear, dated record of the process, this is a good year to change it. When the appointment of a governor is the first entry in a trail that inspectors can follow, you want that entry to be clean.
Running a parent or staff governor election with a proper audit trail is exactly what we built Choice Voting to do. If you want to see how it looks, have a wander around choicevoting.co.uk, or drop me a line and I will talk you through it.