Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026: what has changed

The Government published a new edition of its statutory guidance 'Working Together to Safeguard Children' in March 2026. This replaces the 2023 version of the same guidance.

Whilst those working with children will be very familiar with 'Working Together', often seen as the other side of the coin to Keeping children safe in education, there are substantive changes made this year. The new guidance raises expectations on accountability, reinforces the requirements of anti‑racist and anti‑discriminatory practices, strengthens how the system responds to complex and overlapping harms, embeds children in care and babies more explicitly within safeguarding arrangements, and promotes a more integrated family-based approach to support.

The guidance applies in its entirety to the statutory safeguarding partners (the police, integrated care boards and the local authority). These statutory partners are under a duty to make arrangements to work together with other partners locally, including early education and childcare settings, schools, colleges and other education providers.

However, the guidance remains important for those working in voluntary, charity, social enterprise, faith-based organisations and private sectors to understand and take steps to address. Specific responsibilities for those organisations are described in Chapter 4 of the guidance, including:

• an expectation that the guidance is read and followed by leaders, managers and frontline practitioners of all those organisations;
• having in place appropriate arrangements to safeguard and protect children from harm; and
• being aware of how they need to work with their statutory safeguarding partners in their local area.

Organisations' safeguarding policies should reflect these requirements.

We set out the key changes for 2026 which are relevant to organisations working with children and families in more detail.

Chapter 1: A shared responsibility

• Stronger and more explicit expectations on anti‑racist and anti‑discriminatory practices:
  • Leaders must create inclusive organisational cultures, including through practice, policies, training and external engagement.
  • Staff are expected to have the ability to identify and challenge racism and discrimination, not merely awareness of it.
• Expanded focus on hidden and complex harms, including:
  • coercive control and abusive behaviour in intimate relationships;
  • teenage relationship abuse; and
  • child sexual abuse (CSA), particularly where indicators may be subtle or disguised.
• Reinforces the principle that safeguarding requires a whole‑family approach while remaining child‑centred.
• Now includes a reference to the DfE's separate guidance – Information sharing advice for safeguarding practitioners – important for those with safeguarding responsibilities in all organisations working with young people to understand and refer to, given the increase in personal data questions arising in safeguarding contexts.

Chapter 2: Multi‑agency safeguarding arrangements (MASA)

• Looked after children are now explicitly included within MASA responsibilities, rather than being treated as separate from local safeguarding systems.
• There will be clearer accountability and inspection arrangements, including:
  • how safeguarding partners are inspected; and
  • clearer roles for independent scrutiny.
• There are stronger data expectations:
  • Safeguarding partners must analyse data to identify disproportionality and racism.
  • There are expanded requirements for effective information sharing. For example, safeguarding partners must have clear, agreed arrangements that enable relevant information and data to be shared lawfully, proactively and in a timely way between agencies to support joint analysis, early identification of risk and coordinated decision‑making for children and families.
  • Annual reports must be jointly produced by the safeguarding partners and must focus on impact and improvement, not just activity, evidencing how multi-agency arrangements are working in practice and how they have improved outcomes for children and families.
• For those who engage with them, there is an updated email address for the Mult-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements Unit: [email protected]

Chapter 3: Providing help, support and protection

• Introduction of 'family help' as a more seamless model, combining targeted early help and section 17 (children in need) support.
• A new reference is added to the Families First Partnership programme, to understand the implementation of Family Help and multi-agency child protection reforms.
• Stronger guidance is given on understanding how racism, discrimination, and previous experiences of services can influence family engagement and trust.
• The guidance now makes it explicit that children often experience multiple harms simultaneously, and assessments must reflect this complexity. Specific forms of harm have been expanded and strengthened to include:
  • domestic abuse (with clearer focus on impact on children);
  • child sexual abuse, including strengthened expectations for strategy discussions and direct work with the child;
  • abuse of infants (including pre‑birth considerations);
  • honour‑based, faith‑based or belief‑based abuse;
  • group‑based exploitation; and
  • online harms, explicitly linked to offline risk and abuse.
• Increased section 47 (child suffering/likely to suffer significant harm) expectations for more robust multi‑agency assessments, direct work with the child, and strategy discussions for child sexual abuse.

Chapter 4: Organisational responsibilities

• Stronger recognition of the vulnerability of looked‑after children, particularly in certain settings.
• Clearer expectation that care planning and safeguarding planning are aligned, rather than operating in parallel systems.
• Reinforces that safeguarding remains a responsibility for all organisations, not only children’s social care.
• A new reference is added with a link to the Prisoners' Families Helpline, which prison staff may use to find local services who can support children who are impacted by parental imprisonment.

Chapter 5: Learning from serious child safeguarding incidents

• The Government is clear that this chapter has been restructured from the 2023 Guidance, and so it will be particularly important for relevant staff within safeguarding partners to read and understand this section in full. Changes made include:
  • Providing an explicit instruction that serious child safeguarding incident notifications must be submitted even where a child’s identity is not yet known. Also making clear that all affected children must be included, and that safeguarding partners must consider the wider family and systemic context, including whether the incident poses risks to other children or reflects patterns of harm beyond the individual case..
  • Strengthening expectations that learning also takes place from incidents below the notification threshold.
  • Confirming that rapid reviews conducted by statutory agencies may be shared with government in exceptional circumstances.
  • Tightening the timescale for completion, requiring submission within 15 working days of the notification.

There are no changes to Chapter 6: Child death reviews.

Appendix A: Glossary

• New definitions are included for a number of terms. Of particular relevance will likely be that of 'Group-based child sexual exploitation'.

Appendix B: Further Sources of Information

• New resources have been added to the Appendix, including links to guidance on Operation Encompass (governing an information sharing duty between police and relevant educational settings, where a child is a victim of domestic abuse, including situations where they are and are not present during the incident).
• New resources which those working with children may also find particularly helpful also include guidance on child knife possession offences and 2025 guidance on communicating with children from the Centre of Expertise on child sexual abuse.

Summary of changes in Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026

These changes underline an increased emphasis on accountability, collaboration and the quality of safeguarding practice across society. Organisations working with children and families may wish to review their safeguarding arrangements, information‑sharing processes and training frameworks to ensure they remain aligned with the updated guidance and the expectations placed on agencies and practitioners from March 2026.

This publication is a general summary of the law. It should not replace legal advice tailored to your specific circumstances.

© Farrer & Co LLP, May 2026