Bridging the gap between trustees' legal responsibilities for safeguarding and their actions

PROJECT:

Safeguarding for DofE Trustees

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Trustee engagement

'Three questions' framework

In active use

Legal safeguarding oblgations

Better met

The Duke of Edinburgh's Award 'Safeguarding for DofE Trustees'

“We’ve had a great experience working with snowfish over many years. He has supported the DofE’s learning needs since the late-1990s, turning our concepts, ideas and requirements into engaging and meaningful learning experiences.

Always exploring new approaches and embracing the latest tools and thinking, Jason has helped us create some truly outstanding learning for our varied audiences.”

Ian Newbery,

Senior Volunteers and Safeguarding Manager

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award

Safeguarding young and vulnerable people

For charities like the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring young and vulnerable people are protected from harm. We designed and built a rich, interactive learning experience and toolkit that gives DofE Trustees the knowledge, skills and confidence to provide effective safeguarding oversight, challenge, and leadership.

A small audience with an enormous responsibility

The DofE’s Safety and Safeguarding Team approached Snowfish with a seemingly straightforward request: to develop an online safeguarding module for the charity’s Trustees.

The audience was small, but critically important. DofE Trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring that safeguarding is effective. They help set the organisation’s culture, scrutinise its approach and seek assurance that young people, volunteers, staff and everyone involved with the charity are being properly protected from harm.

The only initial source material was a detailed Safeguarding policy document. It was an essential foundation, but it had been written to govern organisational practice, not to help Trustees understand how safeguarding responsibilities should influence their own decisions and behaviour.

Simply turning the policy into a shorter, more attractive online module would not be enough. We needed to discover what Trustees genuinely needed to know, notice, ask and challenge, and then give them practical ways to do it.

Researching the real role

Snowfish led the research and learning design, working closely with the DofE Safety and Safeguarding Team and drawing upon our own extensive experience of ethics and compliance learning.

We researched UK charity law and regulatory guidance to understand the safeguarding obligations placed upon charity Trustees. We explored the boundary between governance and operational responsibility, identifying where Trustees should provide oversight and challenge without becoming directly involved in managing individual safeguarding cases.

We also considered how Trustees might encounter and influence safeguarding in practice. Their contribution is not limited to formal safeguarding discussions at Board meetings. Safeguarding may need to inform conversations about strategy, risk, partnerships, organisational performance and culture, as well as what Trustees notice during visits, events and everyday interactions with the charity.

Together, we defined three goals for the learning: to help protect the people involved with the DofE, protect Trustees by equipping them to fulfil their responsibilities, and protect the charity by strengthening a safeguarding culture led from the top.

These goals gave the module a clear performance focus. The challenge was no longer simply to explain the policy. It was to help Trustees become informed and constructive critical friends: supportive of the organisation’s safeguarding work, but confident enough to remain curious, seek evidence and challenge when necessary.

Creating a practical Trustee toolkit

The central design question was simple: What could Trustees realistically remember and continue applying months or years after completing the module?

Snowfish’s answer became the ‘Three Questions’ for trustees to continually ask:

We paired the ‘Three Questions” with three ‘Enabling Behaviours’:

Neither of these existed before the project. We created them by bringing together our legal research, the DofE’s policies and the practical competencies and behaviours all trustees needed to demonstrate.

Together, they turned a complex collection of legal, regulatory and organisational responsibilities into a simple, repeatable way of thinking and practical toolkit that Trustees could carry into their wider role.

Designing learning for judgement

Safeguarding cannot be made meaningful through policy summaries alone. We therefore began the learning experience with people, not legislation.

Real personal stories illustrated the potentially lifelong consequences of safeguarding failures. Examples from across the charity sector then demonstrated the wider effects of poor governance on victims, organisations, public trust and the people responsible for oversight.

Interactive interviews brought together Trustee, organisational and independent safeguarding perspectives, helping Trustees understand both the importance and boundaries of their role.

The module then placed Trustees inside credible safeguarding and governance dilemmas. Rather than testing whether they could recall a rule, the scenarios asked them to exercise judgement, recognise uncertainty, seek assurance and apply the Three Questions as situations developed.

Reflection activities helped Trustees examine their own confidence. A Knowledge Check reinforced essential understanding, while a downloadable summary and carefully selected guidance allowed the toolkit to continue supporting them after the module was complete.

Learning that continues to influence practice

The result was much more than a digital explanation of statutory responsibilities. The module gave Trustees a shared language, greater clarity about their role and practical tools they could continue using in Board discussions and across the wider life of the charity.

Safeguarding is now considered not simply as a standalone agenda item, but as a lens through which Trustees can examine strategy, risk, culture and organisational decision-making. The module also forms part of the DofE’s ongoing Trustee induction and development.

Most importantly, the Three Questions have travelled beyond the learning experience. As one DofE Trustee explained: “The Three Questions framework has stayed with me. It gives me a simple, repeatable way to interrogate our safeguarding position.”

What began as a policy document became an original and enduring performance-support tool, helping the people ultimately responsible for safeguarding at the DofE provide informed oversight, constructive challenge, and positive leadership.

Find out more about the DofE’s Trustees