Staff shortages pose a risk to government plans to bolster the safeguarding of the growing number of children not in school, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president has warned.

Andy Smith told MPs this week that several councils had less than one full-time equivalent elective home education worker, meaning the workforce was “significantly insufficient” to take on new responsibilities in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The bill would require councils to create registers of children not in school, collect information on their education arrangements and support parents of home-schooled children with their education on request.

Parents would need to seek councils’ consent to home educate children subject to a child protection enquiry or plan, while councils would need to review the home and learning environments of home-schooled children subject to such safeguarding measures to determine whether they should be required to attend school.

Growing numbers of home educated children

The measures are designed to improve both the safeguarding and education of home educated children, the number of whom has risen from 116,300 during 2021-22 to 153,300 in 2023-24, according to Department for Education data.

In separate appearances before the education select committee and the committee of MPs scrutinising the bill, Smith said councils’ “hollowed out” elective home education (EHE) workforce would lack the capacity to take on these responsibilities without extra resource.

According to a 2021 ADCS survey of directors, councils’ average spend on EHE services in 2020-21 was £86,211, while they employed an average of 2.2 FTE staff for this purpose.

Lack of staff in local authorities

In his evidence to the public bill committee considering the legislation, Smith said that several councils – including his own authority, Derby – had less than one full-time equivalent staff member working on EHE.

“If you superimpose the changes envisaged by the bill, that provision would be significantly insufficient,” he said.

ADCS president for 2024-25, Andy Smith (picture supplied by ADCS)

“If we think about the practical things around visits, understanding the offer, trying to understand what is happening to children and building up that picture, there would need to be sufficient capacity to get sufficient workers in post across places to do that, and they would need be sufficiently trained.”

The point on training was picked up by Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel chair Annie Hudson, who gave evidence alongside Smith to the education select committee this week, as part of its current inquiry into children’s social care.

‘Need to skill up home education staff on safeguarding’

Hudson said visits to children’s homes to consider whether they should be required to attend school when subject to a child protection enquiry or plan would be carried out by EHE staff, who would “not necessarily have deep safeguarding knowledge and expertise”.

“They should have the foundation knowledge, but we will need to be clear so that those officers undertaking that work know what they might need to look at and look for and families know that
so that it is a transparent relationship when the local authorities execute that duty,” she added.

The government is yet to set out how much funding will be available to implement the legislation, but Local Government Association (LGA) assistant director of policy Ruth Stanier said it was vital all new burdens on councils were suitably resourced. She said the LGA and the DfE were holding talks about this already.

Multi-agency child protection teams

Stanier said the bill’s introduction of multi-agency child protection teams was another area that would require additional resource.

Under the plans, councils, chief officers of police and relevant NHS integrated care boards (ICB) would have to set up one or more multi-agency teams for the relevant local authority area. These would comprise at least one representative from each of the NHS and the police, along with at least two practitioners appointed by the local authority, a social worker and an educational professional.

Under the bill, the teams’ role would be to support the relevant local authority in the exercise of its child protection functions, though it is likely that they would in effect carry out those functions.

The idea, which is being tested in 10 areas under the families first for children pathfinder, was based on a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel in its 2022 report on the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

Suggested benefits of joint safeguarding teams

Hudson told the education select committee that, while not a panacea for the challenges facing the child protection system, the introduction of the teams had three potential advantages:

1. Making it much easier for professionals from different agencies to share information about children, giving them a “much more real-time picture of what is going on in a child’s life, particularly when there are sudden changes”.
2. Pooling the expertise of different professional disciplines and enabling practitioners from different agencies to challenge, as well as support, one another.
3. Enabling joint decision making about the child, as opposed to the “siloed decision making” evident in the Arthur and Star cases.

Based on the model being tested in the pathfinder area, the multi-agency teams would include so-called lead child protection practitioners, whose role would be to lead child protection enquiries and hold cases.

Concerns over social worker burnout

While expressing broad support for the teams, Smith reiterated ADCS concerns about social workers holding only child protection cases and not working across a wider spectrum of children’s needs.

“We need to mitigate and minimise issues around burnout and make sure that social workers, through their professional development, have a rounded experience of social work across a broad
array of service users and service types,” he told the education select committee.

The teams are one of a number of measures designed to improve multi-agency safeguarding. These include the introduction of a single unique identifier (SUI) for each child, which professionals should use when sharing information, and a duty to share information for safeguarding and welfare purposes.

‘Risk of increasing volume of information’

Smith was cautious about the potential benefits of the changes, given the barriers to information sharing arising from agencies having separate and unconnected IT systems, distinct recording practices and different cultures.

He said the benefits of information sharing came when practitioners from different agencies came together to “understand what is happening for children…moving beyond single incidents”.

“There is a risk that increasing amounts of unanalysed information that might pass from A to B does not necessarily keep children safe,” he told the select committee.

Citing ADCS research that found councils received 3,001,339 safeguarding concerns in 2023-24, Smith warned: “Starting to add additional information that might come through the single unique identifier could increase that exponentially.”

The DfE plans to pilot the SUI prior to nationwide implementation.

Inadequate information sharing between agencies has been an all-too-familiar finding of reviews into child deaths or other serious cases over many years.

It was a key factor behind agencies’ failure to prevent Victoria Climbié’s murder in 2000, as Herbert Laming, who chaired the inquiry into the eight-year-old’s death, recalled in a recent interview with Community Care.

And, 20 years later, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel found similar failings in relation to the cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, in its 2022 report into their murders.

The Department for Education has made improving information sharing a key part of its children’s social care reform strategy, including by strengthening guidance and testing the establishment of multi-agency child protection teams, as recommended by the panel.

However, social workers appear divided about the effectiveness of information sharing between agencies in child protection cases, according to a Community Care poll.

Just over half of the 606 respondents were positive, with 31% saying information sharing was quite effective and 24% very effective.

But 45% expressed dissatisfaction, rating it as either not very effective (36%) or not at all effective (9%).

What are your thoughts on how well information is shared between agencies during child protection cases?

Practitioners “will not get into trouble” by sharing information to protect children at risk, the data protection watchdog has said.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued the message in releasing guidance today designed to allay frontline professionals’ fears that they will fall foul of data protection rules by sharing information in safeguarding cases.

The 10-point guidance cites the frequency with which case reviews have found inadequate information sharing to have contributed to failures to protect children.

Arthur and Star cases

This includes the reviews into the murders of Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, which found that inadequate information sharing meant professionals were not able to build up a picture of what life was like for either child.

In Arthur’s case, reviewers found that practitioners did not share information with the wider family because they did not have the boy’s father’s consent, meaning they missed the opportunity to reappraise the risks he was facing.

“Locally, child protection practitioners need to feel empowered to share information without consent but we recognise that this is not commonplace,” said the panel, in its May 2022 report on the two cases.”

UK Information Commissioner John Edwards issued a similar message today.

“My message to people supporting and working with children and young people is clear: if you think a child is at risk of harm, you can share information to protect them,” he said. “You will not get in trouble with the ICO for trying to prevent or lessen a serious risk or threat to a child’s mental and physical wellbeing.”

The advice mirrors draft guidance on information sharing issued for consultation by the Department for Education (DfE) in June.

The proposed DfE guidance, which drew on the panel’s report into the Arthur and Star cases, was designed to address concerns that practitioners were not sharing information where they had not obtained consent.

By Nicole Weinstein

The government has sought to address “confusion” among practitioners that is preventing them from sharing information to safeguard children at risk.

Consultative guidance issued last week is designed to address concerns that staff are not sharing information without consent, contributing to what government safeguarding advisers have dubbed the “perennial problem” of inadequate knowledge exchange in child protection cases.

The Department for Education (DfE) stressed that consent was generally “not the most appropriate lawful basis” to pass on information in a safeguarding context. Practitioners should instead rely on other justifications, notably their legal duties or public function.

Children’s social care strategy pledge

The proposed updated advice on information sharing in relation to safeguarding was pledged in the DfE’s draft children’s social care strategy, Stable homes, build on love, published in February.

Drawing on the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s inquiry into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, the draft strategy said information sharing was “challenging and too slow”.

These reviews had highlighted the “confusion, anxieties and poor practices”  among practitioners when sharing information to protect children, said the consultation document on the draft updated information sharing advice.

‘Lack of clarity’ on when to share information

The draft advice itself acknowledges that a lack of clarity could lead practitioners to “assume, incorrectly, that no information can be shared because no consent has been provided”.

The current information sharing advice, last updated in 2018, states that practitioners should, “where possible, share information with consent”.

However, the draft update says states that consent should “not be seen as the default lawful basis” for sharing personal information in a child safeguarding context, as it is “unlikely to be appropriate in most cases”.

This because the person may withdraw consent at any time, or, if a practitioner believes a child is being neglected or abused, seeking consent could “undermine safeguarding procedures” and may increase risk.

Lawful bases to share information

Instead, it points to three other bases for sharing information under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) that could be used instead:

• ‘Public task’ – sharing information is in line with the lawful exercise of a public function.
• ‘Legal obligation’ – it is necessary to share information to comply with the law.
• ‘Legitimate interests’ – the sharing is necessary for the organisation’s legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, unless there is a good reason to protect the individual’s personal data which overrides those interests.

These first two lawful bases are most suitable for public sector staff and the last more relevant for voluntary or private sector staff, the draft advice says.

The information sharing advice is non-statutory, meaning practitioners are not obliged to follow it.

Working Together update

However, it is in line with 2020 changes made to statutory child protection guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children, which now states that consent is not necessary to share information for the purposes of safeguarding, so long as there is another lawful basis to do so.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, which oversees reviews into serious cases involving children at risk and advises the government on child protection, welcomed the consultation.

As well as raising concerns about inadequate information sharing in its report into the murders of Arthur and Star, it found that poor exchange of information at critical points was present in 40% of cases it reviewed for its 2019 annual report.

Information sharing ‘a perennial problem’

“Information-sharing is a perennial problem in child protection,” said a panel spokesperson. “Our national reviews and annual reports show that the failure to share information between agencies makes it difficult for practitioners to build and maintain an accurate picture of what life is like for the child.

“In the worst-case scenarios, this can contribute to children suffering serious harm and sometimes to tragic, fatal incidents.”

The panel’s concerns were echoed by social work academic and Association of Child Protection Professionals trustee Ciaran Murphy, who said: “High profile cases dating back to 1973 with the Maria Colwell abuse case show that people become fearful of sharing information in case it is the wrong thing to do. We continue to see this today in high profile child deaths – and it’s a barrier to protecting children.

Child protection ‘should supersede other concerns’

“The start and end position should be that child protection concerns supersede all other concerns – and there needs to be better clarity on this,” he added.

“Practitioners should ask themselves, can I retrospectively, after the facts, justify my decision-making an action-taking. If you’re sharing information to protect the child, you nearly always can. If you don’t share information and a child is harmed, it’s very difficult to justify.”

The DfE will update the information sharing advice on the back of the consultation, which ends on 6 September.

The DfE is also due to report will be delivered to Parliament by summer 2023 setting out ways to improve information sharing between safeguarding partners and will contain recommendations for potential technical and non-technical solutions.

You can respond to the consultation online or by emailing: informationsharing.consultation@education.gov.uk