Professional curiosity: when “professional” becomes the sleeping partner

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Professional curiosity is explicitly endorsed in educational safeguarding
guidance. But when the phrase is detached from the framework that gives it
meaning, curiosity can retain all its moral force while professional purpose,
jurisdiction and restraint quietly disappear.

When businesses get into bed together, we understand that something is being
exchanged. A recent Independent analysis of the partnership between Ford
and the Chinese carmaker Geely described the companies as “getting into bed
together”, sharing costs, expertise, production capacity and car development.
The article then pursued the questions the metaphor naturally invites: what does
each party bring, what might each surrender, where does the relationship end,
and who may eventually become dependent upon whom?

Words get into bed together too, although
we seldom examine their arrangements quite so closely.

Take professional and curiosity.

Curiosity arrives with an attractive
reputation. It suggests openness, attentiveness and a willingness to question
assumptions. It belongs to learning, discovery and wonder. But it also carries
less comfortable possibilities. Curiosity can be intrusive. It can become
suspicion, prying or an insistence upon knowing what may not properly be ours
to know. And it is, of course, especially dangerous for cats.

Professional brings a different inheritance. It suggests knowledge,
competence, discipline and judgement. It carries standards, accountability and
an obligation to act ethically. It suggests a field of practice within which
someone is qualified to act, accountable for what they do and expected to
recognise the limits of their competence. But
professional status brings less comfortable possibilities too: hierarchy,
defensiveness, claims to authority and the temptation to treat occupational
confidence as professional competence.

When the two words get into bed together,
each appears to improve the other. Curiosity promises to keep professional
judgement open, attentive and resistant to complacency. Professional
promises to give curiosity purpose, discipline and ethical limits.

But which of them actually governs the relationship? Does professional
determine what curiosity is for, where it may go and when it should stop—or
does it merely legitimise it?

In educational safeguarding, professional
can become the sleeping partner: still present in the company name, still
lending the partnership its status, but exercising too little visible control
over the business conducted by curiosity.

When an attractive idea becomes too easy

A recent LinkedIn post about safeguarding culture offered a familiar account of
professional curiosity. Concerns should be heard, explored and considered
carefully. Practitioners should look beyond the first explanation, ask
difficult questions and challenge professional thinking. The child’s experience
should remain central.

None of that is obviously wrong. That is precisely why it deserves closer
attention. The post is not an unusually poor account of professional
curiosity. It is an
unusually clear example of the account safeguarding commonly gives itself.
Curiosity appears entirely as a virtue and further enquiry as its natural
expression. The post does not distinguish noticing from questioning,
clarification from investigation, or educational responsibility from statutory
jurisdiction. Nor does it ask whether, in some circumstances, the professional
decision is to stop enquiring and refer.

This is not a criticism of one individual for failing to reproduce the whole
safeguarding system in a social-media post. Its value lies not in being
uniquely shallow, but in making a wider shallowness unusually visible.
Professional curiosity can circulate among practitioners as though
its meaning were self-evident. Its moral weight survives even when its
operational content has been stripped away.

The problem with shallow accounts of professional curiosity is not merely that
they omit detail. They preserve the moral force of the phrase while removing
the boundaries that make its exercise professional.

If professional curiosity is important enough to appear in statutory guidance,
competency frameworks, training and criticism arising from safeguarding
reviews, it is important enough for us to understand more clearly than that.

The obvious response is that no social-media post should be expected to contain
the whole safeguarding framework. That is true. The more important question is
whether the framework itself supplies what the shorthand omits. Compression is
unavoidable in a short post. The concern is not that the account is brief, but
that everything omitted lies on the side of boundary, restraint and
jurisdiction.

Curiosity is not a procedure

Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 tells staff that a child’s difficulty
in disclosing should not prevent professional curiosity and describes
professional curiosity as vital to the early identification of abuse and
neglect. The phrase therefore has explicit authority within current statutory
guidance.

KCSIE does not, however, present those two words as a complete safeguarding
procedure. It places them within a wider architecture: staff should know what
to look for, speak to the DSL, follow safeguarding procedures and make or
support referrals. Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026 allocates
responsibilities across agencies and identifies who should lead particular
assessments and investigations.

That is the strongest defence of the phrase, and it matters. The statutory
framework is not simply instructing school staff to keep asking questions. Read
as a whole, it supplies much of the professional boundary that the phrase
itself lacks.

The difficulty begins when professional curiosity is lifted from that framework
and treated as a free-standing disposition: good practitioners are curious;
more curiosity therefore appears to mean better safeguarding.

“Look beyond the first explanation.” “Do not accept things at face value.” “Ask
the second question.” “Maintain respectful uncertainty.” Each may be useful in
the right circumstances. None tells a particular practitioner what to do
next.

Curiosity supplies the energy. Professional supplies the legitimacy. Neither
word tells the DSL why stopping may be professional, where the boundary lies,
when it has been reached—or how to stop without withdrawing from safeguarding.

The defect is not that statutory guidance creates an unbounded safeguarding
practice. It is that professional curiosity is easily detached from the
framework that bounds it. For a DSL, the professional work lies as much in
locating curiosity within role, referral and multi-agency process as in asking
another question.

Professional according to which profession?

Andrew Abbott’s work on professions places jurisdiction—the relationship
between a profession and the work over which it claims expertise—at the centre
of professional life. If professional work derives meaning from its
jurisdiction, professional curiosity cannot be an identical competence wherever
the phrase appears.

A detective’s curiosity may serve a criminal investigation. A social worker’s
may serve a statutory assessment. A doctor’s may serve diagnosis or clinical
safeguarding. The same act of enquiry acquires meaning from its purpose,
authority, methods and accountability.

The language of football offers another instructive collocation: the
professional foul.

Calling a foul professional does not make it virtuous. It locates the act
within a field with rules, authorised participants, officials and sanctions. In
R v Barnes, the Court of Appeal recognised that physical conduct in a contact
sport must be judged within that context. Similar conduct away from the match
may be judged very differently.

The analogy has limits, but its point is precise. Boundaries and jurisdiction
are not merely matters of semantics. Conduct does not become professionally
legitimate because a professional undertakes it. Its meaning depends upon
whether it belongs within that practitioner’s field of action and upon the
rules governing it.

What, then, makes curiosity properly professional for a DSL? The answer begins
within the educational and safeguarding role: noticing,
listening, connecting relevant information, making or supporting a referral,
contributing educational knowledge to multi-agency work, and challenging when
the child may not be receiving an adequate response.

That is not lesser work. It is different work. Consider how those differences
might operate around one child.

One child, several professional curiosities

Leah is 14. During an English lesson, her teacher notices that she is unusually
withdrawn and appears uncomfortable when reaching for her bag. After the
lesson, the teacher asks whether she is all right. Leah says she fell against a
radiator. A little later, she adds: “Mum’s boyfriend gets angry sometimes.”

The teacher’s professional curiosity does not require an interrogation. It is
evident in noticing the change, remaining attentive when Leah’s first
reassurance does not settle the concern, giving her space to speak and
recognising the significance of what she then says. The professionally curious
action may now be to stop asking
questions, record Leah’s words and take the concern to the DSL.

The DSL’s curiosity takes a different form. She connects the disclosure with
information already held by the school: several recent absences, a marked
decline in homework, an unexplained change in how Leah travels home and an
earlier concern about her younger brother arriving hungry. She checks whether
there is an immediate safety issue, makes a referral and shares the relevant
history.

Her curiosity is longitudinal. She can see patterns that may be invisible to
someone encountering the family for the first time. But that does not authorise
her to establish precisely what happened in the house, ask Leah to repeat the
account in greater detail or invite the mother’s boyfriend into school to
obtain his explanation.

The social worker’s professional curiosity is wider. The immediate allegation
matters, but so do family relationships, parental capacity, the younger
sibling, previous agency involvement and the conditions within the home. The
social worker may want to understand whether Leah’s mother knows what has been
happening, whether she can act protectively, whether coercive control is present
and whether the children can safely remain at home.

That enquiry may appear to contradict the school’s instinct to take Leah’s
words at face value. The social worker is not necessarily disbelieving Leah. The
statutory assessment requires a broader understanding of risk, protection and
family functioning.

The police officer’s curiosity may be narrower in a different direction. What
happened? When? Where? Who was present? Is there evidence of an offence? Are
photographs, messages, witnesses or forensic opportunities available?

The officer may ask the school and social worker not to undertake further
detailed questioning before a planned interview. That can appear positively
incurious: important questions are being left unanswered. But the restraint
serves a professional purpose. It protects Leah from repeated questioning and
preserves the quality of any evidential account.

The paediatrician’s curiosity follows another path. The pattern, age and
appearance of the injury matter. Does the explanation fit the clinical
findings? Are there older injuries? Could there be a medical explanation? Is
Leah in pain? Does she need treatment? The paediatrician may ask questions that
the teacher properly avoided, but for a different purpose and within a
different competence.

The professionals may then pull in apparently contradictory directions. The
DSL wants Leah’s account taken seriously and may challenge what feels like
minimisation. The social worker wants to assess the wider family picture rather
than reach a conclusion from one disclosure. The police officer wants further
questioning restricted until an interview can be properly planned. The
paediatrician needs enough information to distinguish accidental injury,
inflicted injury and possible medical causes.

Leah may want everyone to stop asking questions while also wanting someone to
make the situation stop.

None of these positions is automatically evidence of insufficient curiosity.
Nor does professional curiosity require every practitioner to pursue every
available question. Each professional is curious for a different purpose,
within a different relationship, under different authority and towards a
different decision.

The risks arise at the boundaries. The teacher could continue questioning
because stopping feels insufficiently
diligent. The DSL could seek a fuller account before referring because the last
referral was rejected for lacking detail. The social worker could interpret the
mother’s cooperation as evidence of safety without exploring coercive control.
The police officer’s concern for evidential integrity could be experienced by
the school as a demand to suspend ordinary pastoral support. The
paediatrician’s absence of a definitive clinical conclusion could be misread as
evidence that abuse did not occur.

Equally, professional boundaries could become professional silos. The school
might defer so completely to social care that it fails to challenge an
inadequate decision. The police might focus upon the provable offence while
wider welfare concerns remain. Social care might assess family functioning
without appreciating the pattern visible across Leah’s school life.

The safeguarding task is not to decide which professional should be the most
curious. It is to coordinate different forms of curiosity without allowing one
to consume the others.

For the teacher, curiosity may mean noticing and listening. For the DSL,
connecting, referring, contributing and challenging. For the social worker,
assessing risk, relationships and protective capacity. For the police officer,
investigating a possible offence while protecting evidential integrity. For the
paediatrician, comparing the history given with the clinical findings and
attending to Leah’s health.

And for every professional, it includes knowing why, where and when their own
enquiry should stop—and how to stop without withdrawing from safeguarding the
child.

The scenario assumes that each practitioner’s curiosity is shaped by a
recognisable professional formation and jurisdiction. That assumption becomes
less secure when we turn to the DSL.

The scenario also reveals something easily missed: professional curiosity is not a single, shared activity in which every practitioner should participate in the same way at the same time. The DSL may need to stop asking and refer; the social worker may need to widen the assessment; the police officer may need to protect the integrity of evidence; and the clinician may need to pursue a different line of enquiry altogether. These are not necessarily failures of collaboration. Multi-agency practice sometimes depends upon one professional’s curiosity giving way to another’s. The unanswered question is not simply, “What do we need to know?” It is also, “Whose work is it to find out?”

A professional role without a single profession behind it

KCSIE says governing bodies and proprietors should appoint an appropriate
senior member of staff as DSL. The person should have appropriate status,
authority, skills and experience, receive the necessary time and resources, and
undertake training updated at least every two years.

Those are significant expectations. They are not a national entry qualification
or an independent licence to practise.

Many DSLs are teachers. They are not required to be. Some schools appoint DSLs
from pastoral, administrative or other professional backgrounds. Where a DSL is
a registered teacher—or regulated through another occupation—that
accountability belongs to the person’s antecedent profession. It is neither a
condition of entry to the DSL role nor a system for regulating DSL practice.

The same title can therefore be held by people with materially different
professional formation, regulatory status and prior preparation. There is no
uniform qualifying route, independent DSL register or DSL-specific
fitness-to-practise process.

That does not mean non-teacher DSLs are less capable, or that a teaching
qualification guarantees safeguarding judgement. It means schools cannot
safely treat the title DSL as evidence of common professional preparation.
Competence must be established, developed and supported rather than presumed.

The problem is not that a DSL entered the role through the wrong route. It is
that no route, by itself, relieves the organisation or practitioner of the need
to develop and assure reflective professional judgement. If schools cannot
assume common professional formation from the DSL title, responsibility falls
more heavily upon leaders and governing bodies to establish competence,
provide reflective support and assure the quality of judgement in practice.

The recent Designated Safeguarding Lead Professional Competency Framework,
produced by the Confederation of School Trusts with the National Association of
Academy Safeguarding Advisors, makes this problem visible. It describes a
sophisticated leadership discipline while acknowledging that DSL training is
unregulated and variable and that research and specific guidance about
performing the role are limited. The framework seeks greater consistency, but
it is not itself a qualification.

One of its standards asks DSLs to recognise their professional limitations and
gaps in knowledge. Elsewhere, professional curiosity is associated with a need
to think beyond usual professional roles.

Those ideas need not conflict. Good multi-agency work requires practitioners to
understand and engage with knowledge beyond their own professional perspective.
But thinking beyond a role does not confer another profession’s powers,
specialist methods or responsibility for leading its work.

The distinction is not between staying in one’s lane and crossing a boundary.
Safeguarding requires information, interpretation and challenge to cross
boundaries. The distinction is between working intelligently across a
boundary and silently assuming the jurisdiction on its other side.

How authority feels in the room

The statutory safeguarding partners are the local authority, integrated care
board and police. Education is not a fourth statutory partner, although schools
are relevant agencies within local arrangements and education’s formal
participation is being strengthened. A social worker with relevant expertise
should lead a section 47 enquiry. The police lead any criminal investigation.
The school continues to protect, record, share, contribute, monitor and
challenge. “Safeguarding is everybody’s responsibility” cannot mean that
everybody has identical responsibilities, powers or jurisdiction.

This is where I need to be honest about the standpoint from which I am
writing.

I have sat in multi-agency meetings after years as a senior leader and DSL,
sometimes alongside newly qualified social workers and police officers younger
than my own children. They could carry statutory authority that I did not. I
could hold years of knowledge about the child, family and school that they did
not.

Neither fact settled whose judgement was better. Both affected how authority
felt in the room.

A DSL may be one of the most senior and influential professionals in a school.
At a strategy discussion, that same person participates in a process in which
another practitioner holds responsibility for leading the statutory process.
Institutional seniority does not travel unchanged across professional
boundaries.

That can create pressure. I do not mean that DSLs generally resent the
authority of social workers or police officers; I have no evidence for that. I
mean that the role requires us to manage the tension between confidence and
humility. We must bring our knowledge forcefully enough to affect the decision
without confusing depth of knowledge with ownership of the process. We must
recognise another practitioner’s authority without allowing it to silence
professional challenge.

When uncertainty is returned

Authority is not felt only in multi-agency meetings. It is also felt when a
referral is declined. A declined referral does not simply close an
administrative process. It returns something to the DSL: the child, the concern
and the uncertainty that prompted the referral in the first place.

The DSL had already exercised what they believed to be sufficient professional
curiosity. They had noticed and connected the information, recognised the
limits of what the school could establish and concluded that another agency
should assess what it meant. Referral was not an attempt to escape uncertainty.
It was a professional decision about who should lead its resolution.

The decline unsettles that decision. It does not necessarily mean that the
referral was wrong, but it can feel like a judgement upon both the referral and
the person who made it. Was the concern insufficiently serious? Was the
information unclear? Had I acted too soon? Had I misunderstood the threshold?
Had involving social care damaged the child’s trust, strained the relationship
with the family or weakened my credibility within school?

More immediately: what should I do now?

Professional curiosity appears to offer two responses. I can challenge the
decision, maintaining that the information already shared warrants further
assessment. Or I can become more curious within school: revisit the chronology,
consult colleagues, seek further context and try to construct a stronger
referral.

Both may be appropriate, but they are not interchangeable. Challenge keeps the
threshold decision with the agency authorised to make it. Further enquiry may
improve understanding, but it may also turn the school into a preliminary
investigating body whose task is to assemble enough evidence to gain access to
another service.

A third possibility is to accept the decision and continue to monitor. That too
may be proportionate—or it may allow another agency’s threshold decision to
displace the DSL’s unresolved professional concern.

I have experienced this uncertainty. A declined referral can improve the next
one: the chronology may become clearer, the analysis sharper and the challenge
more confident. It can also produce defensive delay. The DSL may feel pressure
to gather more, ask more and become more certain before referring again.

Professional curiosity can be invoked in support of every route: challenge,
enquire further or continue observing. The phrase does not tell the DSL which
form of curiosity remains theirs, which uncertainty should be carried by
another agency, or when the appropriate response to a declined referral is not
more investigation but firmer professional challenge.

I am not presenting my experience as research into how DSLs generally behave. I
cannot establish how often a declined referral produces any of these responses.
But I can say that the tension is real because I have experienced it. Integrity
requires me neither to inflate that experience into a universal finding nor to
remove it because it is not a dataset.

Being a good DSL therefore requires more than knowing the referral route or
being willing to ask difficult questions. It requires the ability to notice how
status, previous rejection, fear of damaged relationships and concern for
professional credibility are acting upon one’s judgement. It requires enough
confidence to challenge another agency, enough humility to reconsider one’s
own interpretation and enough self-awareness to distinguish better enquiry
from defensive delay.

These are not competencies readily conferred by a Level 2 or Level 3 online
certificate. Such courses may communicate useful knowledge. They cannot, by
themselves, provide the professional formation, reflective discipline,
supervised experience and judgement upon which the safe exercise of curiosity
depends.

The concern is not that short courses have no value. It is that their
certificates can acquire a professional currency disproportionate to what the
learning has had time to develop or assess. Training can provide knowledge.
Reflective supervision can examine how knowledge, experience, emotion and
authority are shaping judgement. Neither should pretend to do the work of the
other.

The professional element of professional curiosity is not supplied by the
adjective, the title DSL or the possession of a certificate. It is supplied by
formation, reflection, accountability, self-knowledge and the disciplined
exercise of judgement.

Semantic permission for the role to expand

The pressure to gather more before acting does not arise only from individual
uncertainty. It sits within a wider expansion of what schools—and therefore
DSLs—are expected to notice, hold and resolve. There are understandable
pressures for the DSL role to become bigger.

Schools have sustained contact with most children and often possess information
and relationships that other services do not. Work moves towards the school
because the school is there. Concerns that begin elsewhere arrive at its door.
Gaps in services do not make children’s needs disappear.

I have described this elsewhere as education’s tendency to behave like a
conceptual black hole. Recognition becomes responsibility; responsibility
becomes intervention; intervention becomes assumed ownership. In that reading,
the expanding DSL role is what education’s increasing conceptual gravity looks
like when condensed into one person.

That is an interpretation, not a research finding. Expansion may reflect
legitimate policy choices, children’s needs, improved collaboration or the
absence of capacity elsewhere. But professional curiosity is particularly
useful to expansion because it provides no obvious stopping point of its
own.

Almost any further enquiry can be represented as diligent safeguarding rather
than encroachment into another profession’s work.

That does not mean it usually is encroachment. The point is that the phrase
does not help us tell the difference.

The less consistently a role is professionally formed, the more careful we
should be about attaching to it an expansive competence whose limits depend
upon sophisticated professional judgement.

When the phrase becomes the explanation

The same lack of precision operates retrospectively when organisations try to
explain what went wrong. Safeguarding reviews often criticise insufficient
professional curiosity. But what actually happened?

Was information not noticed? Was the child not heard? Were records not
connected? Was a concern not referred? Was a declined referral not challenged?
Did workload, weak supervision or organisational culture impair judgement? Did
a practitioner not know enough—or know enough and fail to act?

These are not interchangeable failures. Describing all of them as insufficient
professional curiosity can make different problems appear to have a single
cause and remedy.

That is gravimantic compression. The phrase gathers failures beneath its moral
weight. “Be more curious” sounds purposeful while leaving the mechanism
untouched.

Dickens and colleagues have made a related criticism of learning from serious
cases: reviews can identify insufficient curiosity or challenge without
adequately explaining why practitioners acted as they did. The point is not
that the term is useless. Another online course in professional curiosity will
not remedy unmanageable workload, fragmented records, disputed thresholds,
weak supervision or a culture in which challenge is punished. The phrase
should begin the analysis, not conclude it.

Returning “professional” to the partnership

I am not arguing that DSLs should be less curious. I am arguing that curiosity
does not become professionally sound simply because
we place the word professional in front of it.

Sometimes professional curiosity means asking another question. Sometimes it
means connecting what is already known, making a referral and challenging the
response. Sometimes it means carrying educational knowledge across a
professional boundary without attempting to acquire the jurisdiction on its
other side.

And sometimes it means recognising that the next question belongs to somebody
else.

For education, a more bounded formulation might be:

Be curious enough to recognise, connect, refer, contribute and challenge.
Be professionally self-aware enough to know when another practitioner should
lead or coordinate the next enquiry.

That is not an invitation to stay silently in one’s lane. It requires the DSL
to question inadequate decisions and remain actively responsible for what the
school must do. It also requires the professional humility to recognise when
further questioning, assessment or investigation belongs within another
practitioner’s competence and authority.

Current guidance has answered whether DSLs should exercise professional
curiosity: they should. The more difficult questions remain. Which role or
profession? Curious about what? For what safeguarding purpose?
Under what authority? By which method? Where does this practitioner’s authority
end? Who should lead next? What should this practitioner deliberately avoid
doing?

Those questions do not diminish curiosity. They make it professional.

Perhaps professional need not remain the sleeping partner after all.

A note on evidence and standpoint

This is an Ardea Insight, not a research paper. It combines current statutory
guidance, relevant professional and academic literature, conceptual analysis
and my experience as a senior leader and DSL. Where I rely upon personal
experience, I identify it as such. It can illuminate a professional pressure
without establishing its prevalence or effects across the DSL workforce.

I have not identified robust research establishing how DSLs generally interpret
professional curiosity, whether it commonly affects referral timing, or how
criticism of insufficient curiosity is distributed across agencies in
safeguarding reviews. Those are genuine questions, not gaps to be completed by
assumption.

The article is concerned with lead jurisdiction, not the transfer of all
safeguarding responsibility. Referral does not end a school’s responsibility to
protect, record, share, contribute, monitor or challenge. Professional
boundaries should not become professional silos.

Selected references

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