Government publishes statutory guidance on information sharing for safeguarding organisations

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act introduced an information sharing duty to provide clarity for practitioners on when they should share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children.

In June, the Government launched a consultation seeking views on the draft statutory guidance, including a data sharing agreement template.

Responding to this, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services described the greater clarity about the common law duty of confidentiality, particularly in relation to health services, as “broadly helpful”.

However, members called for more information on a number of points in the final version of the guidance.

In the statutory guidance published this month (September 2026), the Government said: “The information sharing duty applies to information that may help another relevant person exercise their functions, including assess risk, make a decision, provide support or take action to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child.

“Where the information sharing duty applies, organisations must share information with another organisation, or the requestor, if it is considered that sharing may help the recipient’s relevant functions, including assess need, make a decision, provide support or take action to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child, including when a child potentially poses a risk to others.”

It added: “The information sharing duty does not apply in extremely limited circumstances where a practitioner, acting on behalf of their organisation, determine through professional judgement that sharing information would be more detrimental to the child than not sharing.”

According to the guidance, instances where sharing information may be more detrimental than not sharing would usually relate to at least one of the following:

• “The child being placed at immediate risk of harm by the information being shared;
• Interfering with a police investigation, such that the consequence is likely to be of greater detriment to a child, including placing another child at increased risk of harm – ordinarily this will not be the case; as both police information and police intelligence can and should be shared where it may assist another organisation to safeguard or promote the welfare of children. Relevant insights contained within intelligence can be shared in an appropriate, proportionate or sanitised form;
• Contravention of the Family Procedure Rules, or order of the Family Court or Family Division of the High Court.”

The guidance clarifies that the information sharing duty does not replace existing safeguarding procedures.

“Instead, it makes clear that legislation supports and enables the sharing of information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children.

“This means when practitioners share information, they can now do so with confidence, even where practitioners may have previously been concerned that statutory or local thresholds were not met.”

The full guidance, which includes chapters on ‘misinterpreted barriers to information sharing’ and ‘practical application and information flows’, can be found here.

Lottie Winson