A legal duty to share information
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 introduced into the Children Act 2004 (section 16LA) an information sharing duty (with effect from 30 September 2026) to provide clarity for practitioners on what and when they should share relevant information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children.
The duty aims to improve safeguarding practice by ensuring that professionals share information consistently, confidently, and at the earliest opportunity to help keep children safe and support their wellbeing.
The duty to share information with others for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children applies where organisations and practitioners:
It covers staff working in:
Under the information sharing duty, information can be shared proactively, and there is no requirement for a child to meet a particular statutory threshold before information can be shared. information must be shared where it is relevant to safeguarding and promoting a child’s welfare, including where concerns relate to early help, prevention, emerging concerns and unmet need.
The information sharing duty also applies to information about any other individual connected to a child where relevant to the child’s safety or welfare. Where the terms of the duty are met, information about any individual – a peer or an adult – within a child’s life must be shared.
Information can be shared without consent where it is lawful, necessary, and proportionate for safeguarding purposes. UK GDPR should not be viewed as a barrier to appropriate information sharing.
Decisions should be proportionate, clearly recorded and focused on the best interests of the child.
The information sharing duty does not apply in extremely limited circumstances where a practitioner, acting on behalf of their organisation, determines through professional judgement that sharing information would be more detrimental to the child than not sharing.
Information Sharing Duty: Statutory Guidance for Safeguarding Organisations and Their Practitioners provides further detail. Accompanying the statutory guidance are 2 template data sharing agreements, 1 is strategic and 1 is operational. They are starting points for local adaptation, or to update existing local agreements.
Organisations to whom the information sharing duty applies must have regard to the statutory guidance. Compliance may be considered by regulators and inspectorates.
The guidance states that organisations and practitioners to whom the information sharing duty does not apply may still find the guidance helpful in terms of best practice, and that it may also be helpful for practitioners working with vulnerable adults and adults who could pose a risk to children.
The statutory guidance provides clarity around issues such as data protection, consent and the common law duty of confidentiality. It sets out what organisations must do, in terms of information sharing, if they hold relevant information, and what they should, as best practice, do.
