Delivering better care for children by joining up data across services
The Department for Education (DfE) is working collaboratively with the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), Home Office and other government departments to improve information sharing capabilities to support the safeguarding and welfare of children.
Our goal
Children will be kept safer, and avoid falling through the cracks, as frontline practitioners – with safeguarding and welfare responsibilities across children’s social care, health, police and education – can access relevant, timely and joined-up information to identify need and provide support.
What this means for you
This initiative applies to services in England only.
If you’re a parent, carer or child accessing government services in England, you’ll experience:
- Earlier detection of needs: your family may receive earlier support and interventions, as frontline staff will be able to access and share essential information to meet your needs sooner.
- Reduced risk and improved safety: some children’s overall safety and wellbeing will be improved, as the clarity provided by a new information sharing duty will allow practitioners to better assess risks.
If you’re a frontline practitioner with safeguarding and welfare responsibilities for children in England, you’ll benefit from:
- Easier information sharing: you’ll be able to share and access important information necessary to understand a child’s needs.
- Clarity on duty and law: you’ll be given the knowledge and legal basis (via a new duty) to confidently share information with fellow professionals working with children.
- Early intervention support: the improved information flow will help detect needs early, allowing you to provide support sooner.
- Better-informed decisions: the ability to access a more complete picture of a child’s circumstances will lead to more informed and effective safeguarding decisions.
Our progress so far
December 2024: introduced two new measures through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
A new information sharing duty made it clear to frontline practitioners that information must be shared for safeguarding and welfare purposes. The Bill also included a provision for a Single Unique Identifier to be introduced at a later date, stating our commitment to improving information sharing.
April 2025: piloted the Single Unique Identifier
DfE worked with the Children’s Services department in Wigan local authority to understand the information governance and technical aspects of connecting with the NHS system that provides NHS numbers. DfE is now working with other local authorities to better understand data matching processes with NHS numbers, to understand how frontline staff’s needs in wider areas could be met.
April 2025: started developing new data standards for children’s social care
Practitioners and system suppliers helped develop initial standards to support information sharing and understanding of the placement market within children’s social care to meet their needs. These are now being tested with frontline staff.
June 2025: undertook user research with over 400 safeguarding practitioners
As a practitioner, you may have fed into user research to help DfE to understand the types of information needed for you to undertake safeguarding and welfare functions. This is now informing future pilot design and the development of statutory guidance required to help you be clear on your legal requirements.
What we’re planning to do next
March 2026: define end-state vision and data architecture
Up until March 2026, DfE will be taking information practitioners provided through research and early pilots to design the long-term vision and architecture for the new data sharing approach to ensure it meets your needs.
April 2026: expand pilots
From April 2026, DfE and partners will build on initial test and learn activity in a way that is more aligned to what practitioners expect the final solution will look like. This is likely to involve API connectivity between systems that hold child level data related to safeguarding and welfare and a ‘source of the truth’ of identifiers. This would allow automated look up of the single identifier, the result of which supports a combination of:
- Improved data linking between organisations and across time to better understand relevant safeguarding and welfare risks and opportunities to act early.
- Follow up reconciliation work where identifiers cannot be found with sufficient confidence to explore issues with underlying data quality.
- The opportunity to build further digital services which help practitioners working in safeguarding capacity to more quickly find and access information relevant to decision making.
Autumn 2026: launch statutory guidance
Once the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill comes into force, practitioners will have the opportunity to provide feedback on new statutory guidance ahead of publication to ensure it aligns with their needs, and provides the information for them to confidently undertake the new information sharing duty.
More information
For more information about this work, contact:
Children’s Social Care (CSC) Data and Digital Division
Department for Education
MAIS.programme@education.gov.uk