Characteristics of children in need: 2009 to 2010
Children referred to and assessed by children's social services for the financial year ending March 2010.
Applies to England
Documents
Details
Reference Id: OSR28/2010
Publication Type: Statistical Release
Publication data: Underlying Statistical data
Local Authority data: LA data
Region: England
Release Date: 30 November 2010
Coverage status: Final
Publication Status: Published
It includes information on the characteristics of children in need and information on children who were the subject of a child protection plan for year ending March 2010.
This updates provisional information published in OSR24/2010 on 30 September 2010, as well as providing breakdowns of figures by new characteristics data for age, gender, ethnicity, disability, primary need, category of abuse, and reason for closure.
The key points from this release are:
Children in Need
- There were 375,900 children in need at 31 March 2010, which was a rate of 341.3 per 10,000 children.
- There were a total of 694,000 episodes of need throughout the year.
- There were 377,600 episodes of need starting between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2010 and 318,200 episodes of need that came to an end.
Referrals and assessments
- There were 603,700 referrals to children’s social care services in the year ending 31 March 2010.
- There were 395,300 initial assessments completed in the year ending 31 March 2010, 266,100 (67.3%) of which were completed within 7 working days.
- The number of initial assessments completed in the year as a percentage of all referrals in the year was 65.5%.
- There were 142,070 core assessments completed in the year ending 31 March 2010, 102,910 (72.4%) of which were completed within 35 working days.
- The number of children subject to a section 47 enquiry which started in the 2009-10 year was 87,700. Of these, 43,100 (49.1%) were subject to an initial stage child protection conference. 28,500 (66.2%) initial child protection conferences were held within 15 days of the start of the section 47 enquiry.
Children who were the subject of a child protection plan
- At 31 March 2010, there were 39,100 children who were the subject of a child protection plan.
- In the year ending 31 March 2010, 44,300 children became the subject of a child protection plan. Of these 6,000 (13.4%) became the subject of a plan for the second or subsequent time.
- 37,900 child protection plans came to an end in the year. 2,300 (5.9%) of these children had been the subject of a plan for 2 years or more.
As part of a Government drive for data transparency in official publications we have included supporting data for this publication as an additional table. The underlying data for this publication was made available on 17 December 2010.
Revision - The national figures in table 12 for the number of core assessments, the number of core assessments completed within 35 days, and the percentage of core assessments completed with 35 days were corrected in April 2011. There have been no changes to the local authority level data.
Graham Knox
01325 735413