Children’s Commissioner issues preview of findings from project on data sharing and child safeguarding

The Children’s Commissioner has issued a preview of findings from a project aimed at identifying ways to improve data sharing in child safeguarding systems.

The project has included a cross-government workshop in May and a subsequent round of one-to-one interviews with senior stakeholders.

Meetings have been held with experts from the Cabinet Office’s Central Digital & Data Office, National Police Chiefs Council, the National Data Guardian, and from NHS England.

The Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, said her office would publish a final report in the Autumn. However, she has now given a preview of findings:

• Consent is still considered by too many practitioners to be the most effective basis for data sharing, despite other legal duties providing a stronger basis for sharing information. As one practitioner who attended the workshop said: ‘I think we need to just move away from this idea of consent. It’s not not [sic] very helpful’. 
• We underappreciate how resource intensive data sharing is. Many practitioners expressed a keen interest in being able to develop technological solutions which would link data from multiple safeguarding partners, and which could both more easily allow practitioners to record concerns or engagement with a child or family. However, many are constrained by resources and the need to prioritise urgent safeguarding issues. 
• Pulling together data from multiple agencies is particularly complex and time-consuming. The view of practitioners was that reaching consensus on data sharing agreements, data governance structures, and privacy notices was labour intensive and, in some instances, took years. 
• Across different safeguarding partners within one locality there are often different culture appetites to risk, and appreciation of what safeguarding means. We heard that, despite attempts to make data sharing the ‘default’ for practitioners, many were still apprehensive about sharing information for fear of oversharing details and being prosecuted or fined, or due to a lack of motivation to do so from senior leaders. 

De Souza said her team had also been talking to families about data sharing as part of the Family Review, and it now had a wealth of data and insights from across the country which captures how data is handled, shared, and the concerns which exists across citizens and experts. 

The Commissioner said: “Once the report has been shared with colleagues and professionals, we will formally publish its recommendations. The data sharing workshop was held in partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), who has committed to producing a resource to support data sharing in child safeguarding settings.

"This cross-agency collaboration is something I welcome, and as I said in my opening remarks to the data sharing workshop, I expect all government departments to drive up standards, as we all have a responsibility to deliver good data sharing for child safeguarding purposes.”