ROADMAP-001 — VERSION 1.0 | SAFECHAIN™ 2035 STRATEGIC ROADMAP™
SAFECHAIN™ | STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT SERIES | ROADMAP™
ROADMAP-001 — VERSION 1.0 | SAFECHAIN™ 2035 STRATEGIC ROADMAP™
SAFECHAIN™ 2035
STRATEGIC ROADMAP™
A Decade of Development: Research, Publication, Pilot Programmes, Education, Certification, International Engagement, and Governance Innovation
Document Reference: ROADMAP-001
Series: SAFECHAIN™ Strategic Development Series (ROADMAP™)
Planning Horizon: 2026 to 2035 — ten-year strategic development roadmap
Author: Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Status: Published — First Edition
Version: 1.0
Date: July 2026
Classification: Public — Full Distribution
Annual Review: This Roadmap is reviewed annually as part of the REPORT-001 Annual Report process. Specific milestones are updated to reflect progress and revised strategic context.
Publisher: SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
Contact: samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
Introduction: Why a Decade Matters
The SAFECHAIN™ 2035 Strategic Roadmap™ sets out the development ambitions of the SAFECHAIN™ ecosystem across the next decade. It is not a project plan — it does not define the specific activities, resource allocations, and timelines that operational planning requires. It is a strategic vision document: a ten-year account of what SAFECHAIN™ intends to become, what it intends to contribute, and what the safeguarding governance landscape of 2035 should look like if the programme achieves what it is designed to achieve.
A decade matters for safeguarding governance reform for specific reasons. Legislative reform cycles operate over multiple parliaments. Regulatory standards embed themselves over years of inspection practice. Professional education programmes take three to five years to change what qualifying practitioners know. And the cultural transformation of institutions — the deepest and most consequential change the SAFECHAIN™ framework requires — happens in the time it takes for an organisation to move from Level 1 (Reactive) to Level 5 (Leading Practice) on the Institutional Maturity Model™, which the evidence suggests takes between eight and twelve years of sustained governance development. A roadmap that ends at three years is a pilot programme schedule. A roadmap that ends at ten years is a strategic vision for a transformed national governance landscape.
This Roadmap is honest about uncertainty. Ten-year forecasts in governance, technology, and policy are speculative by nature — the legislative environment of 2035 cannot be predicted with confidence; the technology capabilities that will be available are not fully known; and the political conditions that will determine the pace of institutional adoption are unknowable. The Roadmap therefore defines ambitions and direction rather than fixed targets, identifies the conditions that would need to be in place for each ambition to be achieved, and is clear about which elements depend on external decisions — by government, by regulators, by institutional leaders — that SAFECHAIN™ cannot make on behalf of others.
Phase 1: Foundation (2026–2028)
The Current Position
SAFECHAIN™ enters 2026 with a complete constitutional publication architecture of more than eighty documents across fifteen series; a fully developed governance doctrine in the NOM™, NVI™, and SIS™ series; a professional practice library in the GUIDE™ and TRAIN™ series; an institutional quality framework in the CERT-001 and AUDIT™ series; and the five-institutional-doctrine documents (PROTO-004, WHITE-003, AUDIT-006, DEPLOY-003, WHITE-004) that position SAFECHAIN™ as a full institutional doctrine rather than a governance framework. The publication architecture is substantially complete. The institutional infrastructure — the Training Authority, the Accreditation Office, the research programme, and the governance bodies — is in development.
Research Priorities 2026–2028
The immediate research priority is the body of work required to support the SAFECHAIN™ pilot programme evaluation and the academic publication programme. Three specific research outputs are targeted for this phase. The first is the pilot programme primary data study — a longitudinal data collection programme, designed in partnership with an academic institution, tracking safeguarding outcomes for individuals in the NVI™ network against matched comparators outside the network across the pilot programme period. This is the primary data study that the ECON-001 Economic Model identifies as the evidence that would strengthen the investment case from conservative modelled estimates to empirically grounded impact data.
The second is the peer-reviewed publication programme — the submission of three to five articles derived from the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Series™ to peer-reviewed journals in the governance, law, and social policy fields. The target journals are Feminist Legal Studies, the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Social Policy, and Public Administration. Peer-reviewed publication establishes the academic standing of the SAFECHAIN™ constitutional framework in the scholarly literature — enabling researchers to build on it, cite it, and engage with it critically in ways that strengthen the framework.
The third is the ORCID research programme — a structured programme of primary research under ORCID 0009-0009-9479-0819 covering the empirical dimensions of the SAFECHAIN™ framework that the current publication programme documents analytically but not empirically: the governance culture conditions that enable or impede NOM™ implementation; the practitioner experience of CIF™ recording burden; and the survivor experience of the Single Disclosure Standard in practice.
Publication Priorities 2026–2028
The publication programme in Phase 1 completes the constitutional stack with three priorities. First, the NOM-009 and NOM-010 publications — the International Implementation Architecture and the National Infrastructure Blueprint that complete the NOM Series™. Second, the CERT-002 through CERT-005 sector-specific certification standards for healthcare, housing, financial services, and the voluntary sector — translating the universal CERT-001 certification framework into sector-specific application guidance. Third, the TRAIN-002 and TRAIN-003 sector-specific competency frameworks — extending the TRAIN-001 universal framework with the sector-specific knowledge requirements for the five GUIDE™ profession contexts.
The Annual Report programme begins with the first REPORT-001-compliant Annual Report, covering 2025–26 and published by 31 October 2026. This is the document that begins SAFECHAIN™'s public accountability architecture — the first annual account of what the programme has produced, where it has fallen short, and what it intends to do in the following year.
Pilot Programme 2026–2028
The Phase 1 pilot programme is the operational priority that everything else serves. Three pilot sites — Urban Intensity, Mixed Authority, and Rural and Remote — operating for 24 months with a six-month preparation phase, independently evaluated, and producing the evidence base for national adoption. The pilot programme is the first test of the SAFECHAIN™ architecture in real institutional environments — and its findings will shape everything that follows in the Roadmap.
The pilot programme's success condition is not that it produces uniformly positive findings. It is that it produces honest findings — evidence of what works, evidence of what does not, evidence of where the constitutional architecture needs revision, and evidence of what institutional conditions determine the quality of implementation. A pilot programme that produces only positive findings has either operated in unusually favourable conditions or has not been evaluated rigorously enough. The SAFECHAIN™ pilot evaluation is designed for rigour, not for reassurance.
Professional Education 2026–2028
Phase 1 professional education priorities are: achieving 100 percent MØPIT™ Level 1 completion across all pilot programme institutions before the pilot launches; establishing the SAFECHAIN™ Training Authority with its first cohort of Licensed Training Partners; developing and piloting the CIPID™ Level 2 programme for the Verification Practitioner and Continuity Practitioner competency levels; and engaging the five primary professional regulators (Social Work England, NMC, CIH, College of Policing, FCA) with the SAFECHAIN™ competency framework for integration discussion.
Governance Innovation 2026–2028
Phase 1 governance innovation priorities are: the establishment of the SAFECHAIN™ Accreditation Office with its first cohort of SAF™ assessors; the completion of the first Foundation Certification assessments for pilot programme institutions; the establishment of the Lived Experience Advisory Panel under the NOM-007 PTLF™ framework; and the development of the Technology Partner Governance Framework to enable the first certified CIF™ middleware products to enter the market.
Phase 2: Growth (2029–2031)
The Anticipated Position
By 2029, the SAFECHAIN™ programme should have: completed the pilot programme evaluation and published findings; initiated regional deployment in at least three regional areas beyond the pilot sites; established the Training Authority and Accreditation Office as operational governance bodies; achieved Foundation Certification for at least 20 institutions; and produced the Spending Review submission that funds national rollout. The Phase 2 ambitions are contingent on Phase 1 achieving these conditions — a Roadmap that is honest about contingency builds in the checkpoints at which the strategic direction must be re-assessed rather than assuming a linear path to 2035.
Research Priorities 2029–2031
Phase 2 research priorities shift from the pilot data collection phase to the pilot data analysis and publication phase. The primary research output is the Pilot Programme Research Report — the full analysis of the pilot programme evidence across the four evaluation dimensions (safeguarding outcomes, rights compliance, institutional governance quality, operational feasibility), published as a monograph and submitted in article form to peer-reviewed journals. The Pilot Programme Research Report is the single most important publication in the SAFECHAIN™ academic development trajectory — it is the primary data study that moves the investment case from modelled to evidenced.
Phase 2 also initiates the longitudinal governance culture study — a multi-year research programme tracking the governance culture development of pilot programme institutions from Level 1/2 through to Level 3 Foundation Certification, documenting the specific conditions that enable or impede the cultural transformation that the AUDIT-002 Governance Culture dimension and the PC7 assessment require. This study is designed to produce the first empirically grounded evidence of what institutional governance culture change actually looks like at practitioner and leadership level.
Publication Priorities 2029–2031
Phase 2 publication priorities are: the Rights and Justice Series™ (RJS™) — a new series addressing legal aid, court reform, and access to justice in the domestic abuse context, drawing on the pilot programme evidence of PIVF™, CHVF™, and TIV™ framework performance in family court proceedings; the Health and Mental Wellbeing Series™ — a new series addressing the SAFECHAIN™ framework's application to the healthcare vulnerability governance context, drawing on the pilot programme's healthcare site evidence; and the Digital Governance Series™ — a new series addressing the governance implications of AI, digital identity, and automated decision-making in the safeguarding context, establishing the SAFECHAIN™ constitutional principles for the governance of safeguarding technology as artificial intelligence capabilities develop.
Certification 2029–2031
Phase 2 certification ambitions are: achieving Foundation Certification for all pilot programme institutions and the first wave of regional deployment institutions; completing the first Advanced Certification assessments for institutions that achieved Foundation Certification in Phase 1; establishing the Benchmark Programme with the first National Benchmark Analysis published in the Phase 2 Annual Report; and developing the sector-specific CERT-002 through CERT-005 standards with sector regulator engagement.
International Engagement 2029–2031
Phase 2 initiates the international development programme with three priority jurisdictions: Scotland (which has its own legislative and governance framework requiring specific adaptation under NOM-009); the Republic of Ireland (which shares the UK's common law tradition and has its own domestic abuse governance reform agenda); and Australia (where the federal safeguarding governance reform agenda has produced policy demand for intelligence-led governance frameworks similar to SAFECHAIN™). The international development programme does not seek to export the SAFECHAIN™ constitutional stack unchanged — it seeks to develop jurisdiction-specific adaptations that maintain constitutional fidelity (the NOM-001 Six Operating Principles apply in all jurisdictions) while translating the legislative, regulatory, and institutional context.
Phase 3: National Operation (2032–2035)
The Target Position
By 2032, SAFECHAIN™ targets national network coverage at the level at which every local authority area in England and Wales has at least one participating institution in each of the five institution categories at Foundation Certification or above. The Trust Authority is a statutory body with full constitutional authority. The NVI™ Standards Board is producing annual standards updates that incorporate pilot and operational learning. The professional education programme has integrated MØPIT™ into at least three qualifying professional programmes. And the first Excellence Certification institutions are operating as the benchmarks against which the national governance standard is calibrated.
Research Priorities 2032–2035
Phase 3 research priorities are the long-term outcome studies — the primary research that tracks, over five to ten year periods, the safeguarding outcomes of individuals who have been in the NVI™ network compared with comparable individuals who have not. Long-term outcome studies in safeguarding are rare because the timeframes required exceed standard research funding cycles. The SAFECHAIN™ Research Programme, operating independently of government funding cycles, is designed to sustain the longitudinal studies that produce the decade-level outcome evidence that the strongest possible investment case requires. By 2035, the target is the first publication of five-year outcome data from the pilot programme cohort — the definitive evidence of what a decade of intelligence-led safeguarding governance produces for the people at its centre.
Phase 3 also initiates the international comparison study — research comparing the outcomes of the SAFECHAIN™-governed UK network with the outcomes of comparable governance systems in the international development programme jurisdictions. International comparison is the research methodology that produces the strongest causal evidence for the impact of governance architecture on safeguarding outcomes — because it allows the SAFECHAIN™ architecture to be assessed as a system variable across different national contexts.
Digital Tools 2032–2035
By 2032, the digital tool landscape for safeguarding governance will have been transformed by developments in artificial intelligence, digital identity, and automated decision support that are currently in early development. The SAFECHAIN™ Digital Governance Series™ (initiated in Phase 2) provides the constitutional framework for the SAFECHAIN™ programme's engagement with these developments. The Phase 3 digital tools ambition is: the development of AI-assisted CIF™ composition tools that reduce the recording burden on practitioners while maintaining (and potentially improving) the intelligence quality of submissions; the development of AI-assisted trajectory analysis tools that enhance the SIS-006 Predictive Safeguarding™ capability with machine-learning-based pattern detection; and the development of digital identity solutions that reduce the authentication burden on NVI™ network participants while maintaining the Zero Trust security model.
Each of these digital developments is subject to the SAFECHAIN™ constitutional constraint that technology serves governance, not the other way around. AI tools that reduce the recording burden are governed by the same intelligence quality standards as human-generated records. AI-assisted trajectory analysis is subject to the same ethical governance filter that governs the Risk Engine. And digital identity solutions must meet the same rights-respecting standards as the current identity architecture. The Digital Governance Series™ is the governance framework that ensures these constraints are maintained as the technology landscape develops.
Governance Innovation 2032–2035
Phase 3 governance innovation ambitions centre on three developments that will define SAFECHAIN™'s governance architecture for the decade beyond 2035. The first is the Parliamentary Intelligence Function — a formal mechanism through which the SAFECHAIN™ network's aggregate governance quality data (the network-level Constitutional Integrity Audit findings) is reported to Parliament through the Governance Council's Ministerial Champion, creating a direct parliamentary accountability link between national safeguarding governance quality and the democratic oversight that public institutional governance requires. The second is the Lived Experience Governance Integration — the development of the NOM-007 Lived Experience Advisory Panel into a formal governance body with defined advisory powers within the Trust Authority's constitutional framework. The third is the International Governance Network — the establishment of a network of Trust Authority equivalents in international development programme jurisdictions, enabling the constitutional evolution of the SAFECHAIN™ framework to incorporate the learning from diverse governance contexts.
The 2035 Vision
By 2035, SAFECHAIN™'s ten-year vision is a safeguarding governance landscape that is recognisably different from the one that exists in 2026. A landscape in which: institutional amnesia is the exception rather than the norm; the single disclosure standard is operational across the NVI™ network; economic abuse survivors have a governed pathway to financial recovery; predictive safeguarding has moved intervention earlier in the escalation trajectory across thousands of cases annually; the accountability architecture makes governance failures visible before they become harm; and the governance culture of participating institutions has shifted — genuinely and measurably — from compliance-orientation toward outcomes-orientation.
That vision is not guaranteed by the publication of this Roadmap. It is made possible by it. The governance architecture is designed. The investment case is made. The professional framework is built. The certification system is operational. The research programme is underway. And the manifesto has said, in the clearest possible language, why this matters and what it is for.
The decade ahead is the decade in which the architecture becomes the reality. The organisations that join the network, the government that invests in the infrastructure, the practitioners who build the competency, the researchers who produce the evidence, and the survivors whose lives are the ultimate measure of whether it has worked — they are the actors whose choices will determine whether the 2035 vision is the outcome the Roadmap anticipated or the aspiration it documented.
SAFECHAIN™ will report annually, through REPORT-001, on how the journey is going.
Conclusion: A Roadmap Is a Commitment
Publishing a ten-year strategic roadmap is a commitment. Not a commitment that every milestone will be achieved on schedule — governance, research, and policy development are subject to contingencies that no roadmap can eliminate. It is a commitment to a direction: to the research priorities that will strengthen the evidential foundation; to the publication programme that will complete the constitutional architecture; to the professional education programme that will build the workforce; to the certification programme that will make governance quality visible; to the international development programme that will extend the architecture beyond the UK; and to the governance innovations that will make the constitutional framework sustainable for the decades beyond 2035.
It is also a commitment to honesty. Every SAFECHAIN™ Annual Report will assess the Roadmap's progress honestly — reporting what was achieved against what was targeted, explaining where the Roadmap's assumptions proved incorrect, and revising the strategic ambitions where the evidence requires it. The Roadmap is not a promise. It is a plan. And plans are honoured not by achieving everything they set out, but by taking every setback as evidence that requires engagement rather than as a failure that requires concealment.
ROADMAP-001 should be read alongside PROTO-004 (Institutional Framework™), WHITE-004 (Manifesto™), WHITE-005 (Institutional Impact Statement™), and REPORT-001 (Annual Report Framework™). Contact: samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved.
SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453).
SAFECHAIN™, and all associated series, frameworks, models, architectures, engines, standards, competency frameworks, certification systems, economic models, deployment frameworks, technical architectures, and intellectual constructs are proprietary intellectual property authored and developed by Samantha Avril-Andreassen.
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