How will a single unique identifier improve safeguarding for children?

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
Desmond Tutu

The words of anti-apartheid and human rights activist Desmond Tutu were given centre stage at the recent National Children and Adult Services conference in Liverpool, attended by Policy in Practice. They speak volumes on their own, yet are particularly relevant to social care plans now, given the backdrop of cuts to local authority budgets and increasing plans to use data to move upstream in social care preventing harm to our most vulnerable children.

The government’s 2025/26 budget includes a £600 million increase in funding for social care. Alongside this increase in funding come plans for a single unique identifier for children; a reference number assigned to all children for use in education, health and social care.

However, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (CIPFA) stark research into social care funding has found this boost and the wider social care budget falls many billions short of what is needed to make improvements. Is better use of data key to making this money stretch and how can we prevent harm with something as basic as a reference number?

In the year ending March 2024, 485 children were affected by serious child safeguarding incidents. This means that 485 children died or were seriously harmed as a result of abuse or neglect.

Policy in Practice has built a simple, clever software platform called MAST (Multi-Agency Safeguarding Tracker) to reduce this number. MAST is designed to share headline data daily between key safeguarding agencies on individuals and households, so they can contact partners and make more informed safeguarding decisions.

Creating an environment where agencies can communicate with each other more frequently through data brings us closer towards our goal of connecting safeguarding partners and empowering them to make more informed safeguarding decisions.

Announced in the white paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, the UK government plans to introduce a single unique identifier (SUI) for children to help improve services like education, health, and social care. The SUI is a digital identification number given to every child that would stay with them throughout their childhood, and possibly beyond.

Right now, different public services (like schools, the NHS, and social care) use separate systems and records. It can be difficult to share information between them, leading to delays, mistakes, or gaps in support. A single identifier could help join up these services, making it easier to provide the right help at the right time.

If a child moves to a new area or school, their information could transfer easily, so they don’t fall through the cracks. Services could identify problems like poor school attendance or health concerns more quickly, reducing duplication and saving time for professionals.

However, some worry about how sensitive information will be stored, shared, and protected. There are fears it could lead to over-surveillance or discrimination if not handled carefully, and creating and managing the system could be expensive and complex.

Currently, data is not being linked between key safeguarding agencies in the way that it should be, or often not being linked at all. In fact, fewer than half of local authorities said that they were linking data on all children in their local authority areas.

A single unique identifier for children could be a game changer for safeguarding practice.

Currently, we’re working with different ‘unique’ identifiers and combinations of reference numbers to support our safeguarding tracker platform, MAST. These references include numbers or codes that relate to an individual and form part of a set of similar identifiers, such as UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers) and NHS numbers, among others.

The Department for Education previously acknowledged that using a single unique identifier across all services would allow records held by multiple agencies to come together to identify risks to children. Family risk and composition would be better understood by different agencies and safeguarding risks to individuals and families would be identified earlier.

The white paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, confirmed that the new government will prioritise legislation in this area. This white paper set out the government’s vision for the system including improving data sharing, introducing a single unique identifier, and strengthening multi agency child protection.

Understandably the NHS number is the front runner for a single unique identifier, which would be adopted across services in health and social care. Despite some shortcomings, it is the most universal and viable compared to others such as the Unique Pupil Number (UPN) which is local authority owned and would exclude children who attend independent schools or are home educated.

The Department for Education plans to legislate “at the earliest opportunity” after a pilot implementation period. We very much welcome and look forward to this.

For too long poor information sharing has been identified as a contributory factor to serious child safeguarding incidents, and the barriers to improving this are well documented, including in reviews following the death of, or serious injury to, a child.

Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, November 2024

At the moment the systems we use for MAST are expertly designed to match datasets from key safeguarding agencies to ensure that data flowing from emergency to social care services gets to the right place at the right time, and crucially, about the right person and household.

A single unique identifier for children would not undo this work, rather it would make it simpler to expand this safeguarding work into other areas like education, for example. Even more powerful data matching capabilities in MAST would facilitate even easier collaboration and co-ordination than ever amongst safeguarding agencies.

Our vision for keeping vulnerable people safe through powerful safeguarding data can only happen with national buy in. Data can move fast and we must help it move faster. Whichever SUI is developed will help us towards our goal of connecting safeguarding partners and empowering them to make more informed safeguarding decisions.

Prevention is critical to improve safeguarding and we know that data needs to be more effectively shared across agencies if we are to better protect vulnerable people and reduce the potential of people falling into the social care system. This is a big challenge.

Join our free webinar How to securely share safeguarding data to prevent harm. Held on Wednesday 26 February you will hear how leading local authorities and safeguarding partners are using MAST to better coordinate multi-partner approaches to local safeguarding and sharing data.

Get more details about and register here.