Abstract
This chapter examines Global North and South similarities in children and young people’s reactions to school-led child protection programmes. It considers key shifts in social policy that led to the introduction of child protection training in formal educational contexts. It discusses background to this practice in Zanzibar and the United Kingdom and explores some strengths and limitations of this approach. Our findings suggest that school-focused child protection programmes often either have limited influence outside the educational sphere or create unexpected outcomes, which exacerbate difficulties that some children and young people already manage without adult support. Our findings show that focusing on schools as key providers of child protection support can unintentionally create circumstances in which children and young people feel even greater vulnerability in the wider community. It highlights the need for child protection approaches that robustly acknowledge the separate spheres of school and family and which are sensitive to those differences.