Date: 12th December 2025
A significant development has been announced that will shape the future of child protection in England: the creation of a new National Child Protection Authority (CPA). This initiative, announced on 11th December 2025, represents a government strategy to strengthen the system against abuse and exploitation.
For Early Years Practitioners, who are often the first line of defence in a child’s safeguarding journey, understanding these reforms is essential. Here is a breakdown of what the new CPA and accompanying measures mean for you and your important role.
🛡️ The Core Purpose of the Child Protection Authority (CPA)
The press release highlights that the CPA is being established to tackle systemic failings, fragmented information, patchy data analysis, and the slow change of learning from serious cases into consistent practice.
What the CPA Will Provide
- National Oversight: It will oversee England’s child protection system nationally, aiming to ensure that vulnerable children are not failed by local authorities.
- Strong Leadership and Consistency: The body is tasked with driving accountability and ensuring good child protection practice is embedded consistently across all local authorities.
- Identification of Emerging Threats: A key function is to proactively identify emerging harms, including sexual exploitation, domestic violence, trafficking, and organised crime.
- Building on National Learning: The CPA will build upon the work of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, ensuring national learning from serious incidents translates into practical, evidence-based improvements for frontline workers.
Why This Matters to Early Years Practitioners
In Early Years, you play a vital role in observation and early intervention. The CPA’s focus on consistency and embedding good practice means you should see clearer, more robust, and more consistently applied safeguarding guidance and support, backed by national authority.
đź”— Better Information Sharing and Collaboration
The government is also introducing a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill alongside the CPA’s creation. This bill includes measures that directly affect multi-agency working.
Key Measures in the Bill
- Mandatory Information Sharing: The Bill will enforce the mandatory sharing of relevant information between public authorities, ensuring agencies work together and share what they know.
- Single Unique Identifier: Plans are in place to introduce a Single Unique Identifier to help link data across safeguarding agencies.
Why This Matters to Early Years Practitioners
The ‘falling through the cracks’ scenario, often caused by poor information sharing, should be significantly reduced. As an Early Years setting, you work with many external agencies (health visitors, social workers, etc.). Improved mandatory sharing should lead to quicker, more informed, and collaborative responses when concerns about a child arise.
🔎 Focus on Accountability and Learning
The creation of the CPA is a direct response to key recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and the Casey Audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Key Accountability Measures
- Holding Safeguarding Partners to Account: The CPA will have powers to hold organisations, including local safeguarding partners (who oversee local safeguarding arrangements), to account for their child protection work.
- Working with Inspectorates: It will collaborate closely with inspectorates and partners like social workers, police, and healthcare professionals to improve practice. (Frontline criminal enforcement remains with the police.)
- Data and Transparency: The Department for Education is publishing new, more detailed data on child sexual abuse and exploitation to enhance accountability and understanding.
Why This Matters to Early Years Practitioners
Greater accountability and the emphasis on translating learning into practice should result in a more responsive and effective system when you raise a safeguarding concern. The use of better, child-led data will help the system understand and prevent emerging risks.
🗣️ Your Voice Is Needed: The Consultation
A key aspect of this announcement is that the government is conducting a 12-week consultation on the establishment of the CPA.
They are seeking feedback from practitioners, experts, families, and survivors on the new body’s powers, organisational model, and governance structure.
Action Point for Early Years Practitioners
This is your opportunity to influence the design of the new national body. Your day-to-day experience of the current safeguarding system; what works, what frustrates you, and what support you need, is invaluable. Seek out and respond to the Establishing a Child Protection Authority consultation to ensure the new system reflects the needs of the Early Years sector.
Click here to access the consultation:
Establishing a Child Protection Authority consultation
