Many of the policies and initiatives, as well as much of the literature relating to child welfare, have been driven by failures to share, interpret or organise information. Current policies champion initiatives such as multi-agency safeguarding hubs (MASHs) and other forms of multi-agency working with children and families. Such initiatives are supported by the Centre of Excellence for Information Sharing and are heralded as a means to prevent children from slipping through the safeguarding ‘net’ by improving information sharing between professionals in order to gain a ‘full’ picture of children's and families’ lives. However, as the chapters in the book have shown, and as many have observed over more than four decades, getting information sharing right is difficult. Successive public inquiries remind us that when things go wrong it is often because professionals have failed to share crucial information. This needs to be seen, however, in the context of short-staffed local authority referral and assessment teams, who struggle to ensure appropriate information responses when they are swamped by referrals and subsequent increases in the thresholds criteria for managing demand and resources). Even when information is shared, practice reviews report that miscommunication can occur – things get lost in translation, misread or misunderstood in information exchange processes.

Organisations such as children's services have complex systems for processing the information they receive from other professionals and the public. Social workers are the ‘authorised’ professionals for receiving, rationalising and dealing with referred information, carrying out assessments, and deciding what interventions should follow. Nevertheless, and in what could be regarded as a rather simplistic solution, central government responses to failures in information sharing continue to focus on modifications (improvements) to infrastructures aimed at supporting information recording and exchange, such as more sophisticated information technologies, more detailed guidance or legislation designed to remove apparent barriers hindering effective information-sharing practices. There are issues, however, with this type of response. For example, children's lives are increasingly regarded in terms of fragments of information, or ‘bits and bytes’ to be pieced together.