A freedom of information request to the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) asked how many teachers have been struck off for sexually motivated conduct, and when. The TRA confirmed that it holds this breakdown, and refused, saying the figures were already accessible through published decisions. On review, it admitted that it holds no central record of proven allegations and would need to manually search every published decision to produce the numbers asked for. So, I went through around 800 prohibition order documents and built the picture myself. I found that, since 2019, 244 teachers have been permanently banned from English classrooms for sexual misconduct against children. My analysis found 42 such prohibition decisions in 2024, rising to 94 in 2025 – an increase of 124 per cent in a year – and 40 so far in 2026. For three years running, the TRA’s own annual reports to Parliament have named sexual misconduct among its most common reasons for prohibition. Not once in those three years has it published the actual number. Some cases will be familiar in type, if not name. A deputy headteacher and safeguarding lead in Wigan was convicted of serious sexual offences against a girl under 13. A headteacher and safeguarding lead in Hampshire was prohibited over online communications about sexual activity involving children. In both, the person responsible for noticing was the person who needed noticing. Publishing an annual breakdown by category is not new research. The TRA has already investigated and prohibited these teachers. The underlying decisions already exist. What does not exist is a published dataset that allows Parliament, schools or parents to see the pattern. It isn’t just the TRA. A separate FOI to the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) found that 5,247 individuals were added to the children’s barred list in 18 months, with no public breakdown of how many came from education. Last week, France announced that it will survey around 10 million pupils annually on sexual and gender-based violence, from any source: family, peers or other adults. ‘One child in 10 is a victim’ The French education minister expects “seismic” results, and says one child in 10 is a victim, following a review which found that 85,047 sexual violence complaints involving minors were left unprocessed, excluding so-called phantom cases never properly recorded at all. England is not France. But the question being asked in French staffrooms this week is a question that should be asked in ours: how do we support children in crisis who never tell anyone what is happening to them? The latest keeping children safe in education guidance comes into force this month. AI-generated and altered imagery, including deepfakes, are now explicitly addressed as a safeguarding risk, while governing bodies must review the effectiveness of filtering and monitoring at least annually and keep records of those checks. Asking more of schools is not the same as reaching more children. Almost everything schools are asked to do starts from the adult’s side: filtering, monitoring, incident logs, staff deciding what to escalate. The guidance tells schools what to record and who to tell. It cannot make a frightened child walk up to an adult and start that process. Our safeguarding procedures still rely heavily on a child telling someone, or an adult noticing something. NSPCC research has found sexual abuse can take years to disclose, with children held back by fear, shame, embarrassment and uncertainty over who is safe to tell. As a PR who has supported schools for more than 20 years, when things like this have occurred, I know the NSPCC findings to be true. In some of the 244 cases I researched, the person a child needed to tell was the person they needed to report. A way to start talking Children need a way to start talking that does not depend on finding the right adult at the right moment. The anonymous reporting tool I built and piloted across six English schools gives some sense of what that looks like. Six thousand conversations in 12 months, 79 per cent of them outside school hours, at the times a child is least likely to find a member of staff to talk to. Whatever the right answer turns out to be, it has to work at 11pm on a Sunday, not only at 9am on a Monday. Two things need to change. The TRA and the DBS should publish what they already know, so that we can understand the size of the problem without resorting to FOIs. And statutory safeguarding guidance should require every school to offer at least one route which lets a child start talking without surveillance, and without having to approach a member of staff first.