Legislation | Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026

Introduction and context

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 is one of the most significant reforms to children’s safeguarding, social care and education in a generation. It has now received Royal Assent and is law. While not all provisions take effect immediately, the Act establishes binding duties and a clear direction of travel for how agencies work together to keep children safe and support them to thrive.

The Act responds directly to learning from serious child safeguarding practice reviews, national inspections, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, and growing concerns about children missing education, fragmented information‑sharing, instability in the care market, and widening inequalities in children’s outcomes.

At its core, the Act is about prevention, visibility and shared responsibility. It aims to ensure children are seen earlier, supported more effectively, and protected through stronger, more consistent multi‑agency working across education, safeguarding and care systems.

 

What the Act is

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 is a wide‑ranging piece of legislation that reforms how systems across children’s social care, safeguarding and education operate together. Rather than introducing isolated changes, it establishes a whole‑system framework that strengthens legal duties, improves accountability and formalises practice that has previously been inconsistent across the country.

Although some measures will be commenced in stages through regulations and statutory guidance, the Act itself is now in force. This means organisations should be treating implementation as an active process, not something to wait for.

 

Who it is for

The Act applies to all children, but it has a particular focus on those who are vulnerable or at greater risk of harm. This includes children with a social worker, children on the edge of care, children in kinship care, care‑experienced young people, care leavers, and children who are not in school.

It also affects families and carers, including kinship carers and parents who educate children outside of school, by clarifying expectations, strengthening support, and increasing safeguarding oversight where risk is present.

For professionals, the Act applies across education, local authorities, health, police, housing, early help, youth justice and care providers. It reinforces that safeguarding is not the responsibility of one agency alone, but a collective duty shared across the public sector. Leaders at all levels have a critical role in setting culture, ensuring readiness and driving effective implementation.

 

 

What the Act outlines

The Act introduces a coherent package of reforms designed to strengthen safeguarding, improve outcomes and increase accountability across services. The Act outlines the following areas:

Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements:

Strengthening of multi‑agency safeguarding arrangements. Safeguarding partners are now required to ensure the active and meaningful participation of education and childcare settings at both strategic and operational levels. This reflects the clear recognition that education is a key safeguarding partner and often the service with the clearest day‑to‑day view of children’s lives.

Multi-Agency Safeguarding Teams:

Places a duty on safeguarding partners to establish multi‑agency child protection teams. These teams are intended to improve joint decision‑making, coordination and accountability at the point where concerns about significant harm arise, bringing together social care, police, health and education expertise in a more structured way.

Information Sharing:

Introduces a clearer statutory duty to share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting children’s welfare. Alongside this, it enables the future use of a consistent child identifier, aimed at reducing fragmentation of records across agencies and preventing children from falling through gaps in systems.

Family First Approach

Within children’s social care, the Act reinforces a family‑first approach. Local authorities must now offer family group decision‑making at the pre‑proceedings stage unless this would not be in the child’s best interests. This is intended to ensure families are properly involved in planning and support before court action is considered.

Support for Kinship Care

Support for kinship families is strengthened through a legal duty on local authorities to publish a kinship local offer, and the Virtual School Head role is placed on a stronger footing to promote the educational outcomes of children with a social worker and children in kinship care.

Local offers for Care Leavers

For care‑experienced young people, the Act places ‘Staying Close’ support on a statutory basis, strengthens local offers for care leavers, and removes the possibility of care leavers being treated as intentionally homeless. These changes reflect the ongoing corporate parenting responsibility of the state.

Children’s Residential Care Provisions

Significantly strengthens oversight of the children’s care provisions, including new Ofsted powers to act at provider‑group level, financial oversight of large or difficult‑to‑replace providers, and tougher responses to unregistered or unsafe provision. It also closes a long‑standing legal gap by making ill‑treatment or wilful neglect of 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds in regulated care and detention settings a prosecutable offence.

Children ‘not in school’ registers

In education, the Act introduces major safeguarding‑related reforms through ‘Children Not in School’ registers, clearer powers around home education where child protection concerns exist, and stronger routes to require school attendance where this is in a child’s best interests.

Addressing barriers in Education

It also removes wider barriers to opportunity through free breakfast clubs in primary schools, limits on compulsory branded uniform items, and expanded eligibility for free school meals.

 

Why it matters

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 matters because it directly addresses the recurring factors identified in serious harm and child death reviews: poor information‑sharing, fragmented accountability, children missing from professional view, and uncertainty about who should act.

The Act strengthens the legal foundations for early help and prevention, reinforces education and childcare as a protective service, and makes clear that children missing education are a safeguarding concern, not merely a compliance issue. It also raises expectations of leadership, system readiness and cross‑agency accountability.

In short, the Act moves the system away from reactive responses and towards earlier, joined‑up and legally grounded protection for children.

 

Safeguarding implications and actions for professionals and leaders

Safeguarding implications

The Act raises the bar for safeguarding practice across all sectors. Education and childcare now have a clearly defined and unavoidable role within safeguarding arrangements. Information‑sharing for safeguarding purposes is explicitly legitimised, reducing uncertainty about lawful disclosure when children may be at risk.

Children not in school are firmly positioned as a safeguarding priority, and care‑experienced young people are afforded stronger protection across housing, education and health systems through enhanced corporate parenting duties. Oversight of unregistered and unsafe provision is strengthened, requiring frontline intelligence and partnership working to be effective.

The statutory duty to share safeguarding information and the future introduction of a consistent child identifier also bring significant implications for information governance, data protection and organisational readiness.

 

Actions for professionals

All professionals should:

• Review and update safeguarding policies to reflect stronger multi‑agency duties
• Ensure staff are confident in sharing information lawfully for safeguarding purposes
• Be alert to children who are not in school and understand new referral, consent and escalation routes
• Understand local kinship and care leaver offers to support better signposting

 

Actions for leaders

Leaders should:

• Ensure organisational readiness for multi‑agency child protection teams
• Strengthen links between safeguarding leads, education settings and statutory partners
• Audit compliance with oversight, registration and safeguarding duties
• Invest in workforce understanding of family‑focused, trauma‑informed practice
• Prepare strategically for cultural as well as procedural change

 

In Summary

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 makes one message unmistakably clear: safeguarding children is a shared, system‑wide responsibility.

For professionals and leaders, this is both a legislative change and a call to action - to strengthen collaboration, improve information‑sharing, prepare systems for change and, most importantly, ensure that no child becomes invisible within the services designed to protect them.

 

Links and supporting resources

Key supporting resources include:

• Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026
• Working Together to Safeguard Children  – statutory guidance, with updates aligned to the Act
• Working Together to Safeguard Children (2026): summary of changes
• Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive – the wider reform framework
• Families First Partnership Programme – testing and implementation support
• Keeping Children Safe in Education – statutory guidance for schools
• GOV.UK guidance on Children Not in School, kinship care, elective home education