An opportunity to consult with the Department of Education on Keeping children safe, helping families thrive, and improving data sharing and introducing a Single Unique Identifier.

We are reaching out on behalf of the Department Of Education and the Department for Health and Social Care to seek your views as practitioners on our information sharing proposals and Single Unique Identifier. These proposals are part of the wider package of Children’s Social Care reforms announced on 18 November in parliament.

Poor information sharing has long been identified as a factor in serious child safeguarding incidents. The barriers to improving this are well documented, including in reviews following the death or serious injury of a child. As outlined in “Keeping children safe, helping families thrive” improving data sharing and introducing a Single Unique Identifier can significantly enhance our ability to identify and address risks to a child’s safety and wellbeing. Effective information sharing enables practitioners to make informed decisions and provide timely interventions. We aim to ensure that the right information is shared at the right time with the right people, so the full picture of a child’s life is understood. This leads to improved decision-making, earlier identification of risk, and coordinated support.

Addressing information sharing issues across agencies is a long-term effort, involving both legislative changes and changes in practice. As the start of our work, we plan to introduce two legislative changes that are currently before Parliament in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill:

1. Provision to enable the specification of a Single Unique Identifier.

2. An information sharing duty that provides a clear legal basis to share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promotion of welfare

We are keen to hear from multi-agency frontline practitioners at this point to share their experiences, views on our proposals and how best we can implement them, along with suggestions for our wider programme of work. Please come along and help inform this work as it progresses.