“Essentially, there's no bigger issue in international schools than safeguarding,” said Ed Dorrell, Tes head of content. In the second-ever Tes International Podcast, Ed talks to Jane Larsson, CIS Executive Director and chair of the International Taskforce on Child Protection.

Explaining how the taskforce came to be, Jane sets the scene for why its role is so crucial and tells listeners where schools and educators can access a wealth of free resources to help them with this complex issue.

Jane explained: “I, like many other international education colleagues, probably never thought about the fact that there were people drawn to our profession for the wrong reasons. And that’s a sobering thought. It didn’t enter our minds until a terrible incident in 2014 when we found out that someone who worked in the international education community for 30 years had been systematically abusing young boys, hundreds of them, in ten different countries, in each school he had worked in. We walked around shell-shocked, ‘What are we going to do about this?’. […] ‘What should I have known? Should I have done something?’ […] We realised we had to educate ourselves. We made it our business from that day, we formed the task force […] we reached out to other professions to bring experts in, from law enforcement, medical community, legal profession, psychologists, educators, to figure out what we needed to do to address the unique challenges of child abuse in international education.”

Listen to the full Podcast (25 mins)