Islamabad: As the British Council rolls out a global Safeguarding Toolkit, developed with UNICEF’s support, to address emerging digital and behavioural risks, more than 800 schools in Pakistan will be part of this major student protection programme.
The initiative comes as school safeguarding faces rapidly evolving, hard-to-detect threats, including peer-on-peer harm, mental health concerns and AI-enabled abuse, according to the British Council.
“Since safeguarding challenges increasingly span both online and offline spaces, the Toolkit aims to help schools respond more consistently to risks such as online grooming, harassment, coercion, impersonation and AI-generated abuse, supporting earlier intervention before concerns escalate,” a spokesperson for the British Council said.
According to him, the prevention-led resource drew on more than 15 years of safeguarding experience across over 100 countries and aimed to address a persistent gap between policy and everyday implementation in school environments. The scale of the challenge is significant as Unicef estimates that around 150 million students aged 13-15 experience peer-to-peer violence in or around schools globally. Also, UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union report that one in three internet users worldwide is a child, increasing exposure to online exploitation and manipulation.
Published in The NEWS on March 31, 2026.
