Safe to speak up, safe to be wrong, safe to ask, and you still belong

Halcyon Education  ·  Culture & Safeguarding

Safe to speak up, safe to be wrong, safe to ask, and you still belong

Read enough serious case reviews and you notice something. The phrase psychological safety never appears in them. What they describe, again and again, is what happens without it.

A GP and a pharmacist who both had doubts about a child’s medication, neither of whom challenged the specialist who prescribed it. Several practitioners each holding one small observation about a child, none of it enough on its own, and nobody with a reason to put their piece next to anyone else’s. A nursery where concerns about a member of staff were known to colleagues, to the local authority and to the inspectorate, and where too much of the safeguarding judgement sat with one manager everyone treated as the expert. Local and national safeguarding practice reviews have been finding versions of this for twenty years, and over that time they have moved from blaming the individual who stayed quiet to asking what about the workplace made staying quiet the easier choice.

That is psychological safety, described by people who never used the term.

Everyone knows who. The question is whether.

Every member of staff in every school can name the designated safeguarding lead. Keeping children safe in education makes sure of it. The reviews are full of people who could name them and didn’t go.

They didn’t go because the thing seemed too small. Because the person they would be questioning was more senior, or more experienced, or well liked. Because someone else had probably already noticed. Because the last time a colleague raised something, it didn’t go well for them.

KCSIE already asks for the opposite. The 2026 guidance says all staff “should feel able to raise concerns about poor or unsafe practice” and know those concerns will be taken seriously by senior leaders. It sends anything that falls below the harm threshold to a low-level concerns policy, so that small things get shared rather than sat on. The guidance describes the culture it needs. It can’t create it. Psychological safety is the name for what it is asking for.

What it is, and what it isn’t

Psychological safety means being able to be honest with the people you work with. You can say you’re not sure, say you got something wrong, say you don’t agree, and still be yourself, without being humiliated, blamed or shut out.

Education Support’s guide for schools puts the case plainly: psychological safety is essential in any workplace where error reporting is part of everyday business, and schools are exactly that. Their definition includes being trusted, being able to be honest with managers and colleagues, and having the security to try things and make mistakes.

It isn’t an absence of pressure or problems. Amy Edmondson’s model puts high safety with low accountability in a quadrant she calls the comfort zone, and that is the version leaders rightly worry about. The aim is the learning zone, where high standards and high safety sit together. The safety is what lets people meet the standards, because it lets them say when they can’t.

Four things it comes down to

Edmondson measured it by asking teams whether people felt safe being honest about problems, safe to make mistakes without blame, safe to ask for help, and safe to be different. In a school or a nursery, that comes down to four things.

Speak up

Raising a concern, a disagreement or an idea before being asked. In the room, rather than in the car park afterwards.

Own it

Naming a mistake or a near miss yourself, before being found out. The allergy chart that didn’t match the tray, mentioned the same day, by the person who noticed.

Ask

Saying “I don’t know” or “I need help” out loud, instead of guessing and saying afterwards that it was fine.

Belong

Feeling wanted and included, exactly as you are, without having to hide how you naturally work in order to be accepted.

The first three ask whether someone does the risky thing. The fourth asks what happens to them when they do.

What gets in the way

Education Support’s guide includes a short list of what leaders should try not to do, and two of them belong on every safeguarding lead’s wall: shutting down ideas, requests or challenges, and talking the talk without walking the walk. A whistleblowing policy on the shared drive is the talk. What happened to the last person who used it is the walk.

There is a retention cost too. The 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index found that among education staff who don’t feel well supported by their organisation, three quarters have considered leaving. Among those who do feel supported, it’s 37 per cent. Those two things travel together, and the gap between them is something a staff meeting can move.

What would tell you it’s working

The honest test is what you can check a month later, rather than how people felt in the room. Someone took something small to the DSL, it turned out to be nothing, and they were thanked for bringing it. A teaching assistant questioned a decision made by someone senior, in the room, and the decision changed. A mistake got mentioned the same day, by the person who made it. A near miss got talked through as a team and something changed as a result. A quieter member of staff was in on a decision before it was made, rather than told about it after.

Every one of those is something you can see, rather than something you have to take on trust.

If you want to try one thing before your next staff meeting, ask yourself this: when did someone last bring you something that turned out to be nothing? And what did you say to them?

Halcyon Education works with schools, nurseries and trusts on the culture that lets people speak up, and the leadership that makes it safe to.

If that’s a conversation you’d like to have, office@halcyon.education.

Sources

Dickens et al. (2023), Re-envisaging professional curiosity and challenge, Children and Youth Services Review; Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board (2013), Serious Case Review 2010-11/3; Department for Education (2026), Keeping children safe in education; Education Support (2022), Psychological safety in schools; Edmondson (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly; Education Support (2025), Teacher Wellbeing Index.