Telling services once: a family-held record for the early years
Families tell health visitors, nurseries, GPs and councils the same things because each service keeps its own copy. A record the family holds, shared field by field under consent, lets them tell it once.
A child's first years bring a run of appointments and forms. A health visitor asks about the birth and feeding. A nursery asks about allergies, medicines and who may collect. The GP surgery registers the child, and the council asks again when the family applies for a childcare place or for support. Much of it is the same information, given again each time.
In September 2026, GDS Local and its partners held the Early Years Innovation Challenge in Sheffield, with more than 100 people from local and central government, health, education and partner organisations. Writing up the day, GDS named the effect on families: "Families may have to repeat information to different services, while opportunities to provide earlier support can be missed."
Why families repeat themselves
The same write-up explains the cause. Information about child development "is often held in different systems and organisations and in different formats with differing rules about who can see what." Each service keeps its own copy, because each has its own system, its own duties and its own rules. Joining those systems up is hard work, and GDS concluded that the greater challenge is "enabling organisations to share and use existing information in trusted, effective and child-centred ways."
There is one place where all of that information already meets: the family. Parents carry it from appointment to appointment, in their heads and on paper. A record the family holds, and shares from under consent, lets them tell it once and decide who sees what.
A record the family holds
On Essence, a person keeps documents in their own vault, encrypted on their device before anything leaves it. Sharing from a vault works one field at a time. A document can follow a published schema that names its parts, and a share points at one of those named fields rather than the whole document. A nursery that asks for allergies and an emergency contact would receive those fields and nothing else from the same document.
Since our June release, the vault has recorded every shared field as its own entry: which field, who receives it, the level of access, when it expires, when it was revoked, and the consent it belongs to. The person sets a purpose and an expiry for each share, and can later withdraw one field while leaving the others in place. Both sides can read a consent receipt that sets out the terms without carrying the data itself.
Revoking stops future access. It cannot undo what a service has already read, which is why sending only what was asked for matters most.
Records that change as the child grows
A family's information does not stay still. Addresses change and documents are renewed. Since our September release, a person can record that a new document replaces an old one, and then move the organisations reading the old one across to it, once they confirm. Ordinary consent moves, stays active and keeps the date it was first given. Consent for regulated data moves too, but is held until the person confirms it again. A correction stays inside the document as a new version.
Children also grow up. Essence supports supervised vaults, where a guardian holds a standing proxy over a young person's vault. Since our October release, a young person can consent to a record being withheld from every guardian with that proxy. Notifications are always suppressed, so no guardian learns that the record exists. The platform records the young person's decision; whether a particular young person can give that consent remains a legal and clinical judgement for the people treating them.
What we are designing
We are designing a child health record along these lines: kept in the child's own vault from birth, held by the guardians, and belonging to the child for life.
What this means for early years services
A family-held record would not replace the records each service has to keep, and it would not settle who may see what. That stays with each service and the law that governs it. What it changes is the starting point. Instead of asking a family to begin again, a service would ask for the fields it needs, the family would share them under a consent both sides can read, and each share would keep its own record.
If you are working on early years services and would like to explore how a family-held record could sit alongside them, we would be glad to talk.
Published 10 October 2026