National agency to tackle child protection's 'persistent challenges', says DfE

A new national agency will tackle the “persistent challenges faced by the child protection system” in England, the government said yesterday.

Launching a consultation on the establishment of the Child Protection Authority (CPA), the Department for Education said the system was beset by fragmentation and a lack of national oversight, inconsistency and a failure to translate learning into improvement.

The CPA would address this by providing national oversight to identify emerging risks, embedding good practice and holding agencies to account for their practice, in tandem with inspectorates and regulatory bodies.

Agency will 'challenge poor practice'

In a foreword to the consultation, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the CPA would be "the keystone of a coherent, child-centred and expert-led national child protection system".

"It will have the expertise to identify harms, the authority to challenge poor practice, and the power to drive change across the system," she added.

Creating CPAs for England and Wales was one of the recommendations of the 2015-22 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. IICSA saw them as  repositories of expertise on child protection that would be tasked with improving practice, advising governments on policy and, where necessary, inspecting institutions. 

Response to child sexual abuse inquiry

The Welsh Government said that the country's existing National Independent Safeguarding Board fulfilled most of IICSA's proposed remit for a CPA, with inspectorates such as the Care Inspectorate Wales largely fulfilling the rest.

The then Conservative government rejected the proposal - in relation to England - in 2023, on the grounds that many of its proposed functions were already being carried out by existing bodies. These included the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel ("the national panel"), which reviews learning from serious child protection cases.

However, the current Labour administration accepted the recommendation in April this year, saying that the CPA would absorb the national panel and expand upon its functions.

Expanding role of national safeguarding panel

Though establishing the CPA would require primary legislation, the work of the national panel is being extended as part of a transition to the new agency.

The DfE said this had included greater sharing of learning from case reviews, through webinars, short briefings and infographics, and more collaboration with government departments and other agencies in identifying emerging themes in child protection. 

Next year, the panel will launch an online learning hub to share "easy-to-understand materials" with frontline teams and provide quicker access to child protection expertise.

Child protection's 'persistent challenges'

In the consultation paper, the DfE said child protection suffered from "three persistent challenges":

1. Fragmentation and a lack of national leadership, co-ordination and oversight, resulting in missed opportunities to anticipate emerging harms or respond proactively to new risks. 
2. Good practice not being consistently shared or embedded, undermining the strengthening of expertise.
3. Learning, including from case reviews, not translating into improvement.

These issues were interrelated, with "no single national mechanism to ensure that learning is shared across the system or that recommendations from local and national multi-agency and single agency reviews, inquiries, and reports are systematically captured, synthesised, and acted upon", said the DfE.

'National leadership of child protection system'

The department said it envisaged the CPA filling this gap by providing "national leadership of the whole child protection system".

This would involve:

• Tracking and monitoring the implementation of recommendations from safeguarding reviews and other reports "to create a system-wide picture of child protection practice across England".
• Triangulating information from different sources, including national children's social care data, research, safeguarding partnership reports and safeguarding reviews, to identify systemic risks and emerging trends.
• Advising government on these trends, including in relation to workforce development.
• Disseminating, through a national platform, learning from reviews, inspections and research in accessible formats to ensure insights are understood, shared and applied in practice.
• Producing cost-benefit analyses of its recommendations and helping local areas to prioritise these, while supporting implementation by identifying barriers, showcasing good practice and providing targeted resources for local areas.
• Delivering support to safeguarding partners, to implement action from local and national reviews, working with the DfE's regional improvement and intervention teams to support agencies' improvement plans.
• Holding safeguarding partners to account where serious or consistent failings are identified, including by directing actions to address these and compelling information from agencies to assess risks and inform actions.
• Sharing information with inspectorates and regulators to drive improvement, and advising the government on actions where failures persist.
• Collaborating with regulators and professional bodies to shape training standards and promote consistency across sectors.
• Having its own research and insight function to address evidence gaps.

The DfE proposed that the CPA would also produce annual reports to Parliament, "providing a national overview of child
protection progress and challenges".

CPA 'must provide accountability when agencies fail'

The Centre for expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre) said the establishment of the CPA provided an opportunity to tackle the falling identification of CSA by local authorities, an issue it has highlighted repeatedly.

"The ongoing reduction in rates of identification and response highlights the need for more robust national oversight of progress to tackle child sexual abuse and, if carefully designed and implemented, the new Child Protection Authority will play a key role in this, supported by specialist bodies such as the CSA Centre," said the centre's director, Ian Dean.

For the NSPCC, associate head of policy Sam Whyte said: “Review after review has found that repeated failures to listen to children and young people, share information, and act promptly across multiple agencies have resulted in tragic consequences for too many children.

"The new Child Protection Authority must provide real accountability where agencies fail, and be a powerful mechanism for improving every part of the system.

“Once this authority is established, it must also be backed by substantial investment in the vital support services children rely on. Anything less will fail children, and this cannot be allowed to happen.”

Respond to the consultation

The consultation runs until 5 March 2026 and you can respond by emailing ChildProtectionAuthority.CONSULTATION@education.gov.uk or completing this survey.

The government will respond to this feedback by summer 2026, issuing a plan to establish the CPA, which will then be set up in shadow form pending the primary legislation needed to establish it.