# Role play draws out safeguarding disclosures that direct questions miss

By MarketScale Newsroom · Published 2026-10-26 · Education Technology on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/education-technology/role-play-draws-out-safeguarding-disclosures-that-direct-questions-miss-1272966

> Krystal Keeley of Unique Voice on why a scene gets a child talking when a direct question does not, and how the record still reaches the DSL.

## Key points

- The NSPCC lists four ways a child discloses, and only one is a direct statement; drama and storytelling can help children disclose indirectly.
- In the NSPCC's study of 60 abuse survivors, 117 of 203 childhood disclosures were acted on, so surfacing a concern is only half the job.
- A creative-session disclosure follows the same route as any other: the child's exact words, written down and passed to the designated safeguarding lead under KCSIE 2026.

Krystal Keeley is running a youth provision this October half term, five days with children her staff will meet for the first time on the Monday. By the Friday, she expects at least one of them to say something to a member of her team that they have never told anyone. Keeley, co-founder and director of Unique Voice, a Bristol social enterprise that works through drama, storytelling, poetry, music, art and digital media, described that pattern speaking in a recent interview on Safeguarding and Focus, the podcast from safeguarding software provider CPOMS, hosted by Sam Eustace.

The timing matters for any school listening. The Department for Education's 2026 edition of Keeping Children Safe in Education, the statutory guidance every school and college in England must follow on identifying, recording and escalating concerns, came into force on 1 September 2026, with a part one that every member of staff is expected to read. Any new route by which a child speaks up, including a drama session, has to feed that process rather than sit beside it.

Keeley's case for the creative route rests on a count her team made of its own disclosure records. Children who tell a Unique Voice facilitator something serious often tie it to a character they have just watched or a scene they have just played.

## Why a character on stage gets further than a question

The mechanism, as Keeley describes it, is distance. A child watching a performance or playing a role is reacting to someone else's life rather than being asked about their own, and can say they related to that character, or that something at home looked like that scene, without first deciding to make a report. Eustace described the safety net the child feels: it is only a game, only acting, so saying the thing becomes an experiment rather than an admission.

Keeley contrasts that with the direct question a worried adult reaches for: tell me when this happened, tell me who was there. In her view the question can lead the child toward the answer the adult expects, and it leaves no space for the grey area a child may be living in.

The NSPCC, the UK children's charity, sets out the same point as practice guidance. In a page updated in November 2025 it says staff should never wait for a child to say directly that they are being abused, because children may not be able or ready to share, or may want to tell someone and lack the words. The NSPCC lists four ways a child discloses, and only one of them is a direct statement.

The other three are an ambiguous verbal statement, a behaviour that signals something is wrong, and a non-verbal act such as a drawing or a letter. For the finding that children give clues through actions and indirect words, the NSPCC cites research by Allnock and Miller and by Cossar and colleagues, both from 2013.

Unique Voice's main tool for those indirect routes is what drama practitioners call forum theatre, which Keeley describes as safely playing out different scenarios and then changing them: what happens if we take that line out, what if we add pink to the drawing. The facilitator does not know where the story will go, and Keeley says that shared uncertainty gives the child ownership of the session. For a safeguarding lead, the practical point is that the stimulus is doing the asking.

## Five days to a disclosure nobody had on file

Keeley says her staff have a reputation for disclosures that no designated safeguarding lead, the named member of school staff who receives every concern and decides whether to refer it on, had on their radar. She says the team often arrives with notes saying particular young people will not engage, and that those children then contribute in a creative session in a way that surprises the staff who wrote the notes. She credits the outside position: a new adult, a short and intense week, and the safety of play.

That does not mean a blank slate. Keeley says the team does take supporting notes on learning needs and works from a trauma-informed stance, meaning staff plan on the assumption that a child's behaviour may reflect harm they have already experienced. What the team does not carry in is a six-year case history, which Eustace argues can weigh on a child who knows the adult in the room has read it.

A study the NSPCC published in December 2013, reported at the time by the training provider EduCare, puts a figure on why a disclosure nobody expected matters. Researchers interviewed 60 young adults aged 18 to 24 who had experienced high levels of abuse as children, and found 80 per cent had tried to disclose while it was happening. Of the 203 childhood disclosures in that NSPCC study, 117 were acted on by the person who received them.

Those disclosures ranged from direct verbal statements to clues in behaviour or words, which is exactly the territory a drama session works in. For an operator, that study turns Keeley's week-long club into a question of what the school does on the Friday afternoon, because surfacing the concern is half of the job.

## The NSPCC also wants adults to ask directly

The same 2013 NSPCC study cuts against part of Keeley's argument. Its authors concluded that professionals need to ask young people about abuse in a direct and developmentally appropriate manner while making sure they can disclose safely, and some of the young adults interviewed said they could not disclose at the time but wished someone had noticed and asked them.

Keeley's practice does not actually drop the question; it changes its timing and its object. After a performance her team asks whether anyone relates to that character, or whether something like that has happened to anyone here, and she says the delivery itself teaches children how a disclosure can be managed once it is made. The direct ask comes after the stimulus has given the child a safe way to answer it.

The published research on drama with children answers a different question from the one a safeguarding lead is asking. A systematic review published in the journal Children in September 2022 by Marij Berghs and colleagues examined drama therapy for children and adolescents with psychosocial problems, looking at effects, means, therapeutic attitude and supposed mechanisms of change. It is peer-reviewed work on drama with children, and it is about therapeutic outcomes rather than whether a child tells an adult something.

That review does not test how often a drama or storytelling session leads a child to disclose, so Keeley's figure is Unique Voice's internal count rather than a published benchmark. A safeguarding lead weighing the approach can treat it as one organisation's experience with a plausible mechanism behind it, and the recording step has to be in place before the rate is trusted.

## The record still goes to the DSL in the child's own words

Keeping Children Safe in Education does not change because a disclosure arrived through a scene rather than a conversation. The Department for Education describes it as statutory guidance on safeguarding children and safer recruitment, which means a school cannot opt out of its process for identifying, recording and escalating a concern, and the September 2026 version replaced all earlier editions when it came into force.

What the facilitator writes down is governed by the same rules as a classroom disclosure. In a 2020 guide to the designated safeguarding lead role, CPD Online College, a training provider, says anything a child discloses should be recorded in the child's own words exactly as said, with what was happening at the time, where the disclosure took place and anything relevant that happened just before. Under that rule, a facilitator who notes that a child said a scene looked like home is recording a disclosure, and interpretation sits outside the facilitator's job.

The guide also sets out the route after that. The DSL, not the drama facilitator, decides whether a concern goes to children's social care. Where a child is in immediate danger the first call is 999, and other concerns are routed to the local authority's child protection services, where the local authority designated officer, the LADO, takes action.

The NSPCC's February 2020 role description for a nominated child protection lead adds the detail that matters most for a holiday club: every organisation working with children needs a named lead who receives concerns, owns the policy and training, and stores records, and the NSPCC says there should be a procedure for responding to concerns when that lead is absent or unavailable, which could include nominating someone trained to act as deputy. A club running Monday to Friday in half term has to know on the Monday who its lead is and what happens if that person is away.

Verification is not the facilitator's task either. The NSPCC's November 2025 guidance says disclosure is a journey rather than a single act, that children may start sharing before they can put their thoughts in order, and that not every disclosure will lead to a formal report, but every one should be taken seriously. That is also the control on misreading a child: the facilitator records the words and the context, and the DSL and the agencies behind them weigh what it means.

## Training for the adult holding the scene

CPD Online College's guide puts the training floor at level 2 safeguarding training for all staff, refreshed every two years, and level 3 for the designated lead on the same cycle, with staff meetings and training days used to update procedures. A visiting drama facilitator sits inside the host school's KCSIE process for identifying, recording and escalating concerns for the duration of the session, so the test that applies is the one the school already runs: where the record is and who acted on it.

The closest thing to a protocol for what happens mid-session comes from the NSPCC's January 2023 briefing on research with children, written for researchers but built around the same risk. The briefing says any activity that asks children about their experiences can reawaken memories or cause distress, and that the team needs a clear plan for responding to distress and disclosures, a referral process for child protection concerns, and a debrief at the end that gives another chance to spot a need. It also recommends placing sensitive content in the middle of a session so children can warm up and cool down, and avoiding times of day when support services are not available.

Translated to a drama club, that is a scene about a hard subject placed after the games and before the wind-down, a facilitator who knows the DSL's name, and a leaflet with Childline's number, 0800 1111, which the NSPCC says should go to every participant. Keeley's own preparation is a reminder of role: her team made an animation with young people a couple of years ago about what a trusted adult is, and plays it before almost every big delivery.

## Fifteen minutes, two children and no props

Eustace pressed Keeley on the school with no studio and no budget for an outside company. Her answer starts with a myth she hears often, that creativity needs resources and props, and she says Unique Voice is stringent about that even in its own work. Keeley's lowest-cost version is fifteen minutes, two children having a tough morning and a breathing exercise the adult does alongside them.

The detail that matters is the word alongside. Keeley tells staff to model what they want to see, so the adult admits they need a moment after a rushed morning and does the finger breathing too, rather than setting the exercise and leaving the room. She warns that children smell an agenda, and that badging a session as the programme they have been picked for is the quickest way to lose them.

Unique Voice's breakfast clubs are the scaled version. Keeley says the session opens with a mindful moment and regulation exercises, and that staff can watch children walk into their classrooms calmer, with their nervous system settled and their physicality changed. At the other end of the day she credits concentrated creative activities in after-school and holiday clubs with better focus, better processing and better teamwork with peers.

Eustace's version costs nothing at all: the walk from one room to another, used to talk about something interesting rather than to move a child in silence.

Keeley adds one outcome beyond disclosure. When children make or watch performances about knife crime, relationships or bullying, she says they come away with a greater awareness of what it is like to be affected, and that describing such an experience in words does not land as hard as seeing it played out. Empathy, she says, is one of the effects Unique Voice sees a lot.

The signal Keeley points to is the note that follows a session: a disclosure from a child the school had never flagged. The NSPCC's 2013 study gives the test for what happens next, since the 10 per cent of disclosures its interviewees described as positive shared the same features, the child felt believed, someone took a protective step such as a report to another professional, and emotional support followed. A school that adds a drama scene or a breakfast-club breathing exercise this term can expect new disclosures, and by the NSPCC's measure each one is judged on whether it reached an adult who believed it and acted.

## Sources

- [Keeping children safe in education](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education--2) (Department for Education / GOV.UK)
- [Recognising and responding to child abuse and neglect](https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-abuse-and-neglect/recognising-and-responding-to-abuse) (NSPCC)
- [New report from the NSPCC: No one noticed, no one heard](https://www.educare.co.uk/news/2013/12/new-report-from-the-nspcc-no-one-noticed-no-one-heard-/) (EduCare)
- [Designated Safeguard Lead: roles, responsibilities and referrals](https://cpdonline.co.uk/knowledge-base/safeguarding/designated-safeguard-lead-role/) (CPD Online College)
- [Nominated child protection lead or designated safeguarding officer](https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/templates/nominated-child-protection-lead-role) (NSPCC)

Tags: Raptor Technologies, CPOMS, Unique Voice, Safeguarding, Education technology, Creative arts in schools

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