The Child Protection Procedures for Primary and Post Primary Schools (Government of Ireland, 2017a) render the teaching of the Stay Safe programme (MacIntyre and Lawlor, 2016) mandatory for all primary and special schools in Ireland. Stay Safe is a personal safety and abuse-prevention programme which aims to reduce children’s susceptibility to abuse by proactively teaching preventative knowledge and skills. The programme is developmentally structured over four age-levels which correspond with the class bands of Ireland’s Primary School Curriculum (Government of Ireland, 1999). This organisational format presents as a challenge for special schools, as many children are not at the same cognitive level as their typically-developing peers. There is a dearth of knowledge on how such schools reconcile the mandatory requirement to teach Stay Safe, with this practical reality. Employing a mixed-methods, two-phase, explanatory-sequential design, this doctoral study addresses the knowledge gap in relation to the enactment of Stay Safe in special schools. Shawer’s (2010a) theoretical framework for curriculum approaches underpinned the research, and particular interest was shown to the role that leadership plays in the enactment process. Phase 1 incorporated a questionnaire sent to every special school principal in Ireland (n=133) via Qualtrics. Phase 2 used the data collected from the questionnaire to inform an embedded case study with three special schools – a Mild, a Moderate and a Severe-Profound General Learning Disability School. Moseholm and Fetters’ (2017) Explanatory Bidirectional Framework was used to weave data from both the quantitative and qualitative phases to illustrate the minutiae of the enactment process. The findings evidence that whole-scale curricular differentiation takes place in special schools in relation to Stay Safe. The Mild and Moderate case schools took a ‘curriculum development’ approach, while the Severe-Profound case school took a ‘curriculum making’ approach (Shawer, 2010a). Leadership emerged as important in the enactment process with positional authority and experience in special needs deduced as key leadership premia. Although derived from the special school context, the findings have relevance for all educational settings, as the drive towards ‘inclusion’ has resulted in mainstream schools with children of diverse cognitive, social-emotional, and physical abilities. Extensive support and advocacy for children with special needs is required in enacting the curricular component to child safeguarding and this study recommends that a ‘Support’ aspect be considered for inclusion in Norwich’s (2010) seminal curriculum model to increase access to the ‘common curriculum’. The research concludes by recommending, inter alia, a new Stay Safe topic framework to increase applicability and accessibility for children with special needs.