Added outcomes for children looked after by local authorities statistics. Added 'Children looked after in England, including adoption' to document.
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Hide this message. Home Data collection and statistical returns. Find out more about cookies. This presents data on looked after children from 1 August to 31 July This is referred to as for ease of reporting with referred to as and so on. Local authorities have a responsibility to provide support to certain children and young people, known as 'looked after children'. A child may become looked after for a number of reasons; including neglect, abuse, complex disabilities requiring specialist care, or involvement in the youth justice system.
This is the seventh consecutive year the numbers have decreased following a peak of 16, in The number of children ceasing to be looked after each year has been consistently more than the numbers becoming looked after over this period, as is shown in publication tables 1.
There are several types of care setting in which looked after children or young people could be looked after, including at home where a child is subject to a Compulsory Supervision Order and continues to live in their usual place of residence , foster care, residential unit or school, a secure unit, with prospective adopters, or in kinship care where they are placed with friends or relatives. Table 1. The figures for will be revised during following receipt of data from Glasgow City.
When children become looked after, a care plan should be produced. The care plan should include detailed information about the child's care, education and health needs, as well as the responsibilities of the local authority, the parents and the child.
A care plan is considered 'current' if it has been produced or reviewed in the past 12 months. The reduction in total numbers being looked after is because more people are leaving care than starting. As shown in table 1. This represents a 6 per cent decrease from the 4, episodes of care beginning in The gender split of those starting episodes of care has remained stable over the last 10 years.
The length of time for which children ceasing to be looked after had been looked after remained similar between and However, when compared with , there are a higher proportion of children who had been looked after for more than five years, and a lower proportion who had been looked after for only a period of weeks. England has a reliable and consistent pattern of data collection — and for that we should be grateful. It is important that this continues.
But having spent the past five years researching the looked-after children data across the UK, I have a number of concerns. The first and most important is that the DfE only collects data about children, not their parents. To prevent children needing to come into care we have to understand who parents are and what they are up against. Second, are we making the most of the data we do collect? Similarly, no data is produced showing the looked after rates per 10, children across the different ethnic categories that are used.
But recent research by Coventry University found that Asian rates are around a third those of White children, hardly a slight difference. And, if you take deprivation into account, White children have higher, not lower, rates than those for Black children in the most deprived areas where the majority of Black children live.
And there are big differences between the rates for African and Caribbean children. Third, is the data completely accurate? My main concerns here are about the data on disability. If you analyse the data by local authority, the proportions of children recorded as being disabled varies hugely.
And it varies systematically and rather unexpectedly with deprivation levels. Low deprivation local authorities report more disabled children than high deprivation local authorities, which seems unlikely or — at least — requires understanding. Disability is another key source of pressure on families, so we need to get this right in order to make appropriate targeted provision. This group who stayed in a Continuing Care placement form a small part of the population of care leavers.
Because the 'higher age' for eligibility has been rising annually as part of an agreed roll out strategy, this data, therefore, only includes those aged between 16 and The Continuing Care policy will be fully commenced by April , allowing all eligible care leavers to remain in their care setting from age 16 until their 21 st birthday.
In the eligible for aftercare collection there is additional information on the population in Continuing Care that can be used to supplement the data in Table 1. Therefore, in total there were young people recorded as being in Continuing Care in It should be noted that this is likely to be an underestimate of the total number in Continuing Care as some local authorities have been unable to return the new category of data on Continuing Care as a destination for those ceasing to be looked after in this first year of collection.
Also, no Continuing Care figures for Glasgow City are available as data was not provided in We will be working with local authorities to gather feedback on the process of data collection, and make changes to improve the completeness of the return next year, and ongoing.
They have been omitted from this column to avoid double counting. The definition of "looked after children" varies across the countries within the UK which makes cross UK comparisons difficult. In Scotland, children placed at home require a supervision order from the children's panel, whereas in England and Wales, being looked after at home is an informal situation put in place by a social worker, often as an interim measure until a foster or kinship care placement can be found.
To improve comparability, the Scotland figure at 31 March has been used, rather than the published 31 July figure, as the other nations publish on this date. Chart 2 gives Scottish figures including a breakdown for children looked after at home and away from home for comparability with the other nations.
Overall, Scotland had the highest rate of looked after children in at an estimated children per 10, under 18 population, the highest rate in the UK. The rate for only children looked after away from home in Scotland is still the highest in the UK at per 10, under 18 population. However, this is only slightly higher than the rate of looked after children in Wales per 10, The rates in Northern Ireland 71 per 10, and England 64 per 10, are much lower. Chart 2: Cross- UK comparison of rate of looked after children per 10, children, 1.
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