Who suffers when safeguarding data stays put? Why data sharing saves lives

It wasn’t that long ago when safeguarding teams were relying on fax machines. At the time this practice felt normal, necessary, and practitioners couldn’t imagine a life without them.

Today, a large section of the safeguarding workforce have never used a fax machine, myself included. We look back, befuddled that despite the prevalence of laptops throughout the workplace, practitioners were sending urgent safeguarding alerts via fax.

Soon we will feel the same way about our risk-averse attitudes to sharing vital safeguarding data digitally. The technology is available to us, yet practitioners who are trying to do the best jobs that they can are limited, trapped in information silos.

Safeguarding must move with the times, or we risk trapping people in vulnerable situations. With the launch of the Department for Education’s consultation on statutory guidance on the information sharing duty introduced in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, it is time to call for modern and data-driven approaches to keep people safe.

When we talk about data sharing for the purpose of safeguarding, people are quick to throw complicated words around and delve into the complexity of their case management systems as reasons not to share. But if we boil it down, data sharing is not a technical issue. It’s an equality issue at its core.

Yes, moving away from manual sharing can mean coordinating our data transfer windows so that high-volume files don’t clash during peak hours, and setting up these systems takes a bit of time. But doing so is a no-brainer when you consider that if you don’t share safeguarding data it is the children in the most vulnerable situations who pay the price.

When data doesn’t cross borders, county lines exploitation can continue unchecked. When gangs and criminal networks involved in moving and supplying drugs between places coerce young people into helping, it is those young people who pay the price. Last year, the National Police Chiefs’ Council found that 2,559 children were recorded as victims of county lines across Scotland, England, and Wales, though actual numbers are believed to be higher. The same review estimated that 11,600 children are going missing and are at risk of exploitation.

If our data flows stop at borders, then county lines are given a chance to thrive and young people are subjected to exploitation through threats, violence, and manipulation.

With this in mind, we have to consider why information sharing can feel so scary. This hesitation doesn’t come from professionals wanting to obstruct information-sharing flows. It’s the opposite: a deep professional duty and desire to protect people and their data. People who are reluctant to share information want above all to protect a family’s privacy, uphold strict confidentiality, and prevent their organisation’s reputation from the ramifications of a data breach.

What we need to learn is that protecting a child’s privacy and protecting them from harm are not competing priorities. Modern safeguarding has to be able to do both.

A false sense of security is created when information sharing does not happen for organisations. The most horrific child safeguarding practice reviews (formerly serious case reviews) very rarely happen because an agency shared too much information, but because of insufficient data sharing between agencies resulting in data silos.

The data says it all. According to the Child Safeguarding Practice Review’s Panel’s annual report, 72% of the 274 rapid reviews in England identified a lack of coordination or handover between services, and families were already known to children’s social care before the incident in 84% of rapid reviews.

When a rapid review happens, the tragedy causes the very institutional and reputational damage that the cautious approach towards data sharing was trying to prevent.

It is time to move away from treating every single data request as case-by-case transactions, and towards automated infrastructure in which data protection is embedded. The future is when every safeguarding agency is running data protection assessments only once, at the point of system configuration. 

From then, critical data must be allowed to flow securely and automatically between partners. We believe it is vital that in non-emergency situations, multi-agency practitioners should have the secure means to access relevant multi-agency data within 24 hours, and within 30 minutes in urgent crises. 

Today Policy in Practice responded to the Department for Education’s consultation calling for the guidance to be digital-led. This guidance provides us with a pivotal opportunity to shape the future of child protection, and safeguarding as a whole. We must take it.