Safeguarding concerns are visible to the home's DSLs and to whoever raised them. A manager who is not also a DSL sees counts only. DSL-private is the setting for a concern you want kept to the safeguarding lead even from other people who could otherwise reach it.

It is not a stronger version of "sensitive". It is a specific, narrow instruction: only the safeguarding lead and I should see this.

Who sees a private concern

You are	A standard concern	A DSL-private concern
The person who raised it	Yes	Yes
A DSL for that home	Yes	Yes
A manager who is not a DSL	No (counts only)	No
Anyone else	No	No

A manager is not a DSL unless they have been designated as one. Without the designation they cannot open the safeguarding concerns for a young person, only those they raised themselves.

Setting it

The Visibility switch sits at the top of Raise Safeguarding Concern. Off, it reads Standard. On, it reads Private to Safeguarding Lead, and ARC shows a note: "Only you and the safeguarding lead can view this concern."

Choose it at the point of raising. There is no control anywhere in ARC to change a concern's visibility afterwards — a concern raised as standard stays standard, and a private one stays private.

Think about that before you use it. Information that the day-to-day team needs belongs in the handover, not in a private concern.

Documents work the same way

Uploading a document to a young person's record asks for a visibility of standard or DSL-private, and the same rule applies: DSL-private documents are visible to the DSL and to whoever uploaded them, and to nobody else.

Two things follow automatically:

A document attached to a DSL-private concern is forced private, whichever visibility was chosen on the upload.
A generated export that would contain private concerns is refused for anyone who is not a DSL, with: "This export would include private safeguarding records that you do not have permission to view. Only the Designated Safeguarding Lead can generate this export."

Where an export does include private content, the document it produces is itself marked private.

Allegations are not this

A concern about a member of staff is a different, tighter setting again — it goes to the DSL, the registered manager and company admins, and never to the person it is about. See Allegations against staff.