Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 16 June 2026 to Question 900535 on Children: Protection, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of creating a dedicated mechanism requiring relevant child risk information to be proactively disclosed to protective parents and carers where necessary to safeguard a child.

Current powers and procedures including ‘Sarah’s Law’ allow both proactive and application-based disclosures of relevant information where this is necessary to protect a child, regardless of the recipient’s relationship to that child.

Any disclosure must be within the existing legal framework and have due regard to the established case law, the Human Rights Act 1998, and the UK General Data Protection Regulation and Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

To better inform where disclosure is necessary, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools’ Act’s Information Sharing Duty and the Crime and Policing Act’s Child Cruelty Register will improve the identification of risk and the visibility of individuals who may pose a risk to children, helping agencies determine when disclosure is necessary to safeguard a child.

The government recognises the importance of timely risk disclosure and has assessed that the benefits of a dedicated risk disclosure mechanism can be achieved through existing legislation that enables disclosure to protect children, particularly the Crime and Policing Act, which places Sarah's Law on statutory footing.