What a MASH is, and what the statutory guidance actually says
A multi-agency safeguarding hub is the local authority's front door for concerns about children, staffed jointly by children's social care and its partners. Oxfordshire describes its MASH as "a multi-agency team which identifies risks to vulnerable children" and "a link between schools, GPs, the police, ambulance service and social care", with the county and city councils, the police, probation, health services, the ambulance service and drug and alcohol services around the same table. Other areas call the same arrangement a front door, a single point of contact or a children's advice and support service; the name is local, the function is the same. Most hubs take referrals from practitioners through a MASH referral form and from a member of the public by phone, and many run a professional consultation line for advice and guidance before you make a referral. The NHS, the police and adult social care sit alongside children's social care in most of them, which is the point: the safeguarding children partnership built the hub so that one referral reaches everyone who needs to see it.
The statutory guidance does not use the word. Working together to safeguard children 2026 puts the duty on the person with the concern: "Anyone who has concerns about a child's welfare should consider whether a referral needs to be made to local authority children's social care and should do so immediately if there is a concern that the child is suffering significant harm or is likely to do so." It then puts the process on the council: "Local authority children's social care has the responsibility for clarifying the process for referrals in their area", with contact details "signposted clearly so that children, parents, other family members and community partners are aware of who they can contact".
So the MASH page on your council's website is the process, and Working together is the standard the process has to meet. Where a child is in immediate danger the route is the police on 999, and the referral follows. Call 999 if a child is at immediate risk of harm; everything else in this guide assumes you have already asked that question.
For schools and colleges, Keeping children safe in education 2026 adds the internal route: any member of staff with a concern speaks to the designated safeguarding lead, and the DSL or a deputy makes the referral. For a charity or a care provider the equivalent is the named safeguarding lead in your own policy, and the same guidance applies to the referral itself.
Before you refer: the concern record, the threshold and the family
The referral is only as good as the note behind it, and the note is written before anyone decides to refer. KCSIE's Annex B says safeguarding records "should be clear, factual, and distinguish between observed concerns, professional opinion, and historic information". Write what was seen or said, when, by whom and in what words, and keep your view of what it means separate from the account. Name the category of concern the way the guidance does, whether that is neglect, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, or a risk to children from someone outside the family, without stretching the facts to fit a heading. A concern that turns out not to need a referral still belongs in the child's file, because the pattern only becomes visible across several small entries.
Then the threshold. Every local safeguarding partnership publishes a threshold document or levels-of-need framework; Oxfordshire's MASH asks a practitioner to have "decided the level of risk" using its threshold matrix and to refer where it is level 3 or 4, and to consider first whether "the child or young person's needs can be met by services from within your own agency". Working together 2026 restructures the lower levels as family help, which "combines targeted early help and section 17 support". A family help assessment "is not a prerequisite for a referral but where one has been undertaken, it should be used to support the referral". Record which level you judged the concern to be and why, in one or two sentences.
Then the family. Good practice, and most councils' forms, expect you to have discussed the referral with the parents or carers and to have their agreement, unless doing so would increase the risk to the child. Oxfordshire's wording is typical: share the information with parents and carers "unless informing parents/carers may increase the risk". Record whether you told them, what you told them, and if you did not, the reason.
What has changed in 2026 is the legal footing for sharing. The information sharing duty in section 16LA of the Children Act 2004, inserted by the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act, is explained in statutory guidance published in September 2026. It states plainly that "consent is not required to share information under data protection law", that the Act makes clear "there is no requirement for a child to meet a particular statutory threshold before information can be shared", and that where the duty applies an organisation "must share information" that may help another organisation assess need, make a decision, provide support or take action to safeguard a child. The one limitation is detriment: the duty does not apply where a practitioner judges that sharing "would be more detrimental to the child than not sharing", a decision the guidance says "should be rare, and carefully considered". Consent is still the right conversation to have with a family; it is no longer the gate on the referral.
The dated, factual concern record, in the child's file. The level of need you judged and the threshold document you used. What you have already done and what your own organisation can offer. Whether the family has been told, and if not, why. The people who know: the DSL, the head, the trustee with safeguarding responsibility. The child's details, the family composition as you know it, and other agencies involved. None of this is new information; it is the information you already have, written where the next person can find it.
During the referral: what to send, what to keep, and what to expect back
Use the route the council publishes. Most MASH pages offer an online form for practitioners, a telephone number for urgent concerns during office hours and an emergency duty team out of hours, and many require a supporting document such as a strengths and needs form for a non-urgent referral. Follow the referral form: the fields are the questions the hub's screening team will ask, and a referral that answers them is triaged faster than a narrative that does not. Upload the supporting document where the form asks for it, submit from an email address the hub can reply to, and note the reference before you close the page.
Keep what you sent. Save the completed form or the confirmation page, the reference number if one is issued, the date and time, the name of the person who made the referral and the name of the person who took a telephone referral. If the referral was by phone, write up what was said the same day. Your record of the referral is the only proof that it was made if the acknowledgement never arrives.
Working together 2026 sets the expectation for the response. "Within one working day of a referral being received, local authority children's social care should acknowledge receipt to the referrer", and a social work qualified practice supervisor or manager "decides on the next course of action within one working day". That decision determines whether the child requires immediate protection and urgent action, is a child in need to be assessed under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, or whether there is reasonable cause to suspect significant harm such that a section 47 enquiry should begin. That is what "next working day" means in practice: by then the hub should have told you the next steps.
"Feedback should be given by local authority children's social care to the referrer on the decisions taken. Where appropriate, this feedback should include the reasons why a case may not meet the statutory threshold and offer suggestions for other sources of more suitable support." If you have not heard within the working day, chase, and record the chase. A referral that is accepted, declined or redirected to family help is an outcome you should be able to name in the child's file with a date.
If you disagree with the outcome, every partnership has an escalation or professional-challenge procedure. Use it, record that you used it and what was decided. Disagreement that lives in a phone call between a DSL and a social worker leaves nothing for the next person to act on.
After the referral: outcomes, timescales and the file
Four outcomes are common, and each has a record shape. Immediate protection, where the action and its timing are decided by the local authority and the police and you record what you were asked to do. An assessment, for which Working together 2026 says the maximum timeframe "should be no longer than 45 working days from the point of referral", and where you may be asked to contribute information and to attend meetings. Section 47 enquiries, with a strategy discussion and, where enquiries are initiated, an initial child protection conference "within 15 working days of a strategy discussion". And no further statutory action, with a suggestion of family help or a service you can provide yourself.
KCSIE's Annex B describes what the file should then show: "a clear and comprehensive summary of the concern, details of how the concern was followed up and resolved, and a note of any action taken, decisions reached and the outcome". That is the whole record in one sentence. Concern, referral, response, actions, outcome, each dated, each attributed, each legible to someone who was not there.
Record the sharing of information as well as the decision. The information sharing guidance asks practitioners to "record the decision for sharing, or not sharing, including any rationale pertaining to relevance, the facilitation of another organisation's relevant functions, detriment and anything else they determine necessary". A line saying what was sent to whom and why is enough; it is the line an inspector or a review will look for.
Keep the child's safeguarding record separate from everything else, restrict access to the people who need it, and where the child moves, make sure it moves with them. For schools KCSIE requires the child protection file to be transferred "as soon as possible, and within 5 days for an in-year transfer or within the first 5 days of the start of a new term", separately from the main pupil file, with confirmation of receipt. A charity or a care provider has no equivalent statutory clock, and should write its own into policy so that the record does not stop when the placement does.
Review the concern at the interval your policy sets even when the outcome was no further action. The value of a safeguarding record is cumulative, and the referral that is accepted is often the third entry, not the first.
Two things that are not a MASH referral
A concern about an adult who works with children is not referred to the MASH. Allegations against staff and volunteers follow the local authority designated officer route, set out in Part 4 of KCSIE for schools and mirrored in most partnerships' procedures for other organisations. The record of an allegation is kept separately, with its own retention rule, and it should not be discussed in the same channels as a concern about a child. Our KCSIE records guide explains the two routes.
A concern about an adult at risk is not a children's referral either. Adult safeguarding runs under the Care Act 2014 through the local authority's adult safeguarding team, with its own thresholds and its own vocabulary. Our safeguarding adults guide covers the six principles and what a care provider records.
The practical point is that a small organisation often has one person holding all three routes in their head. Write them down in the safeguarding policy with the local numbers beside each, and check the numbers every September.
The concern arrives in a message before it reaches the file
In most organisations the first words about a child are not written in the file. A teaching assistant messages the DSL at 8.40 because something a child said on the way in worried her. A volunteer texts the youth club leader on Saturday night. A care worker asks a colleague in the staff group whether anyone else has noticed. The concern exists, and it exists in a place the organisation does not hold and cannot produce.
The rule is not to stop people messaging. It is that the message is the prompt and the file is the record. The DSL who receives the 8.40 message writes the concern into the child's file that morning, in the sender's words, dated and attributed, and the message thread has done its job. What must not happen is for the referral decision, the conversation with the parent and the outcome from the hub to live in the same thread and nowhere else.
ComplyChat provides a channel for the work conversations around a concern. On paid plans, the lasting record files into the organisation's own Microsoft 365 once the archive is connected and filing, so the 8.40 message is producible when a review asks what was known and when. It is not a safeguarding case-management system, it does not replace the child's file, and it is not a route to the MASH. ComplyChat Free is personal messaging with one private group, direct messages and three calendar months of recent history, with no Microsoft 365 archive or Replay; upgrading cannot restore expired history. It is a way to explore the messaging experience, not a place to hold a safeguarding record.
A useful question for the next safeguarding review: for the last referral we made, could we show the first note, the threshold decision, what the family was told, what we sent, what came back and what we did next, without anyone opening their personal phone?
Official guidance and your next step
The primary sources are Working together to safeguard children 2026, Keeping children safe in education 2026, the information sharing duty statutory guidance of September 2026, and your own local safeguarding partnership's threshold document and MASH page. Quotations are from those documents as published on 12 September 2026. Oxfordshire County Council's MASH page is cited as an example of how a council describes the process, not as guidance for any other area.
This guide is a practical starting point for organisations in England, not advice about any individual child or case. Your safeguarding lead, your local partnership's procedures and, where a child may be at risk, the police on 999 come first.
Then do one thing: take your last three referrals and check, for each, whether the file holds the first note, the threshold judgement, the conversation with the family, the referral you sent, the acknowledgement and the outcome. Whatever is missing is what your next policy review is about.
We build ComplyChat for the work conversations organisations need to keep. A safeguarding referral is the clearest case there is of a decision that starts in a message and must end in a record. Explore Free personal messaging, or compare the paid plans if your organisation needs a lasting Microsoft 365 archive.
