Working Together to Safeguard Children
What’s Changed?
The Department for Education has published an updated version of Working Together to Safeguard Children, alongside a revised statutory framework and new practice‑support guidance. This page has been updated to reflect the 2026 guidance and what it means for safeguarding partners and practitioners in North Yorkshire.
Working Together (2026)
Working together to safeguard children – GOV.UK
Summary of changes:
Working together to safeguard children 2026: summary of changes – GOV.UK
What is Working Together to Safeguard Children?
“A guide to multi-agency working to help, protect and promote the welfare of children“
“Successful outcomes for children depend on strong partnership working between parents/carers and the practitioners working with them. Practitioners should take a child-centred approach to meeting the needs of the whole family.“
Nothing is more important than children’s welfare. Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, stable, and loving home. Children who need help and protection deserve high-quality and effective support. This requires individuals, agencies, and organisations to be clear
about their own and each other’s roles and responsibilities, and how they work together.
Working Together to Safeguard Children (Working Together) is a multi-agency statutory guidance that sets out expectations for the systems, processes and ways people work together to help, support and protect children and their families.
Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children includes:
- providing help and support to meet the needs of children as soon as problems emerge
- protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online
- preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development
- ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
- promoting the upbringing of children with their birth parents, or otherwise their family network through a kinship care arrangement, whenever possible and where this is in the best interests of the children
- Taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes in line with the outcomes set out in the Children’s Social Care National Framework
In this guidance, a child is defined as anybody under the age of 18 (the guidance also applies to unborn children)
The 2026 guidance:
- applies to all children, including unborn children, those in kinship care and looked‑after children
- strengthens expectations around inclusive, anti‑discriminatory practice
- reinforces that children may experience multiple and overlapping harms
What’s new in Working Together 2026
A shared responsibility
- Stronger expectations on leaders and practitioners to challenge discrimination and inequality
- Clearer emphasis on safeguarding as everyone’s responsibility
Stronger multi‑agency safeguarding arrangements
- Clearer accountability and scrutiny within partnerships
- Greater focus on using data, learning and impact, not just activity
A more joined‑up system of help, support and protection
- Further development of Family Help, bringing together early help and statutory support
- Emphasis on consistent relationships and coordinated planning
What this means locally
For North Yorkshire, the updated guidance reinforces our collective responsibility to work together as a system, focusing on early support, inclusive practice and learning from experience. The Safeguarding Children Partnership will continue to review local arrangements, share learning and support partners to embed the updated guidance into everyday practice.
Additional Materials
Despite being produced prior to the release of the new 2026 document, the follwing docucuments support the principles of Working Together.
Practitioners can also share and use with children, young people and their families:
- Working together to safeguard children: an illustrated guide for children, young people and their families Statutory Guidance – Working Together Guidance
- The short accompanying animated video
- A toolkit of resources
All children should be helped, supported and protected when things are difficult. The illustrated guide, animated video and toolkit explain to children, young people and their families how individuals, organisations and agencies work together to help, support and protect them.
Why do we have Working Together to Safeguard Children?
The Working Together statutory guidance was initially published in 1999, and set out how all agencies and professionals should work together to promote children’s welfare and protect them from abuse and neglect. It was revised in 2006 following the public inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié.
Following Victoria’s death, the government commissioned a public enquiry leading to the government’s Children Act (2004)
“The Children Act (2004) placed a duty on all agencies to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, and in 2006, the revised version of Working Together was published.“
Since 2006, there have been seven further updates. This review is pivotal in delivering the proposals set out in Children’s Social Care: Stable Homes Built on Love, which is the government’s response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care published in 2022.
What does Working Together include?
This chapter that brings together new and existing guidance to emphasise that successful outcomes for children depend upon strong multi-agency partnership working.
The principles as set out on the Children’s Social Care National Framework also apply in Working Together:
* children’s welfare is paramount
* children’s wishes and feelings are sought, heard, and responded to
* Children’s social care works in partnership with whole families
* children are raised by their families, with their family networks or in family environments wherever possible
* local authorities work with other agencies to effectively identify and meet the needs of children, young people, and families
* local authorities consider the economic and social circumstances impacting children, young people, and families
The chapter also covers expectations for multi-agency working at all levels (strategic leaders, senior and middle managers and direct practice). These expectations ensure that practitioners:
Share the same goals,
Learn with and from each other,
Have what they need to help families,
Acknowledge and appreciate difference,
Challenge each other.
The updated guidance sets out four principles that professionals should follow when working with parents and carers:
Effective partnership and the importance of building strong, positive, trusting and co-operative relationships,
Respectful, non-blaming, clear and inclusive verbal and non-verbal communication that is adapted to the needs of parents and carers,
Empowering parents and carers to participate in decision making by equipping them with information, keeping them updated and directing them to further resources,
Involving parents and carers in the design of processes and services that affect them.
The second chapter strengthens how the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements (local authorities, integrated care boards and the police) work to safeguard and protect children locally, including with relevant agencies.
Changes:
The changes include clarifying the roles and responsibilities of safeguarding partners, emphasising the role of education in safeguarding arrangements. The chapter also considers the importance of voluntary, charity and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations within safeguarding arrangements.
The revision of this chapter focuses on how organisations can provide help, safeguarding and protection for children and their families. It is split into three sections:
Early Help: strengthens the role of education and childcare settings in supporting children and keeping them safe. The approach to working with families has also been strengthened, outlining the role of family networks and the use of family group conferencing.
Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children clarifies that a broader range of practitioners can be the lead practitioner for children and families receiving support and states that partners need to agree on local governance arrangements in relation to this. It also clarifies the role of children’s social care in supporting disabled children and their families, children at risk of, or experiencing, harm outside the home, children in mother and baby units (in prisons) and children at risk from people in prison and people supervised by the probation service.
Child Protection introduces new national multi-agency child protection standards to set out actions, considerations and behaviours for improved child protection practice and outcomes for children. It clarifies the multi-agency response to all forms of abuse and exploitation from outside the home, consideration of children at risk of experiencing extra-familial harm in all children’s social care assessments and includes resources to support practitioners’ understanding of the response to online harm.
In line with Section 11 of the Children Act 2004, a range of individual organisations and agencies working with children and families have specific statutory duties to promote the welfare of children and ensure they are protected from harm. These duties, as applied to individual organisations and agencies, are set out in this chapter.
Changes:
Updates to this chapter include Changes to the Prison and Probation sections, highlighting the mutual benefits of exchanging information with children’s social care, which strengthen and clarify processes and responsibilities for child safeguarding.
When a child sadly suffers a serious injury or death as a result of abuse or neglect, understanding not only what happened but also why it may have happened can help improve safeguarding responses in the future at both a local and national level. Child Safeguarding case reviews are used to identify this learning to seek to prevent or reduce the risk of recurrence or similar incidents.
Changes:
Changes to the chapter include keeping in touch with care leavers over the age of 21 and the reporting of the death of care leavers up to the age of 25 to improve learning and outcomes for this group of young people.
The death of a child is a devastating loss that profoundly affects all those involved. The process of systematically reviewing the deaths of children is grounded in respect for the rights of both children and their families, with the intention of learning what happened and why, and preventing future child deaths. This is managed through the Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP).
Changes
Factual changes have been made to the chapter as highlighted in the DofE Summary of Changes document.
Who is the guidance for?
This statutory guidance sets out key roles for individual organisations and agencies to deliver effective arrangements for help, support, safeguarding, and protection. It should be read and followed by leaders, managers and frontline practitioners of all organisations and agencies.
Working Together Learning Event December 2023.
In December 2023, the partnership welcomed around 100 attendees to hear from our Statutory Partners and some of our relevant agencies about what the changes to Working Together mean for them and their practice.
What do the changes to Working Together mean in North Yorkshire?
Safeguarding partners are working together to implement the changes made to Working Together. Safeguarding partners have been asked to reflect on how to strengthen multi-agency working across the whole system of help, support and protection for children and families.
Safeguarding leads are working to review current arrangements and identify what changes need to be made to comply with the updated statutory guidance.
Updates to arrangements need to be published by the end of December 2024.
What does it mean for me and my role?
Everyone who provides support to children, young people and families should read Working Together to safeguard children and understand what the changes mean for their practice.
They should commit to reviewing current practice and identifying where improvements may be needed so that the best possible outcomes for children, young people and families are being achieved.
Key Documents
Working together to safeguard children – GOV.UK
Working together to safeguard children: statutory framework
Keeping Updated
Partners can keep up to date on the progress of the implementation of changes via the North Yorkshire Safeguarding Children Partnership (NYSCP) business unit. Any updates will be shared with partners via the monthly NYSCP e-bulletin, which can be accessed here NYSCP (safeguardingchildren.co.uk) and via this webpage.
If partners have any questions in relation to the changes, they can contact the business unit at nyscp@northyorks.gov.uk
Page reviewed: March 2026
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