Directors of Children's Services urge greater clarity in information sharing duty statutory guidance

Earlier this month (2 June), the Government launched a consultation seeking views on draft statutory guidance, including a data sharing agreement template.

Responding to this, ADCS members described the greater clarity about the common law duty of confidentiality, particularly in relation to health services, as “broadly helpful”.

However, members called for greater clarity around the following points in the final version of the guidance:

• When receiving information of a concern, or a request to share information local authorities may hold, Children’s Services teams must be able to differentiate between what is fact and what is opinion in order to do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible.
• The guidance has an emphasis on the importance of the context for the information request being shared, but it is important that the context of the response is provided too. In situations where services have had intermittent involvement over a number of years with a family, greater clarity on the level of detail to be provided in return would be helpful to include for the benefit of individual practitioners in their daily work.
• Some further detail on the parameters for sharing information about people connected to the child e.g. the level of contact the person has with the child, would be useful, otherwise well-intentioned action risks infringing on individual rights and liberties and being inconsistently applied across the country.

ADCS members highlighted “ongoing difficulties” in securing information from different police forces or health bodies to inform their own risk assessments and planning.

They said: “The new duty should assist in this regard; however, it would be helpful to include clear prompts for practitioners to both state and record that future requests are made under the auspices of this new duty. It would also be helpful for the guidance to explicitly state that agreed information sharing protocols are not required where the duty is being applied.”

Meanwhile, ADCS members called for the case studies used by Government to be “stronger and clearer” to assist with practitioner understanding.

The consultation response stated: “In some cases e.g. the county lines example, a notification to children’s social care is unlikely to result in an intervention, so it is also important to consider the purpose of a notification. Children’s social care already receives in excess of three million initial contacts at the front door each year.”

ADCS members warned that increasing the amount of unanalysed information that children’s social care receive will not in itself keep children safe.

Finally, ADCS members said it would be helpful if government, and the final version of the guidance, recognised and sought to address and mitigate the “practical barriers” to information sharing which will arise from multiple reform programmes happening on the same timeline to reshape public services - local government, health, the police, schools.

Members noted: “Each of these reforms will necessitate the splitting or amalgamating of records and data sharing systems and agreements will similarly need to be reconfigured and approved as a result of government policy, which is a significant risk to the effectiveness of shared safeguarding efforts.”

The consultation closes on 14 July 2026.

Lottie Winson