Member

The Department for Education is currently interrogating gaps in ‘children in need’ data identified in the audit, which seem to underreport the scale of this crisis. The Secretary of State for Education, my right honourable friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South, Bridget Phillipson, will soon publish the findings of an urgent review of that data conducted by her department. Across government, the audit identified that poor data sharing continues to put children at risk. As a result, we are introducing a legal duty for information sharing between safeguarding partners. We are creating a unique identifier for every child, linking all data across government, and we are upgrading police technology to ensure data can be shared across agencies.