Data guidance
Description of the datasets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.
Description
This guidance describes the data included in the 'Children in need: A focus on disability' release's underlying data files. This is an ad hoc statistical release and uses the annual published data from:
The methodology document for this subject should be referenced alongside this release. It provides information on the data sources, their coverage and quality and how the analysis is produced.
Coverage
The analysis in this ad hoc release contains statistics based upon information from the data collections listed above. Each reporting year covers the year ending 31 March, and our analysis primarily covers the period 2015 to 2025.
Data is collected by the Department for Education in the annual Children in need census (opens in new tab) from all local authorities in England. Information on school characteristics data, including special educational needs (SEN) status and free school meals (FSM), can be found in the data guidance for the ‘Outcomes for children in need’ publication. Information on the coverage of the SSDA903 collection can be found in the data guidance for the ‘Children looked after in England’ publication.
The data presented in this publication is derived by linking child-level identifiers from the datasets above, information includes:
- Demographics (sex, age, ethnicity)
- Primary need at assessment for children in need and primary reason for being looked after for children looked after
- Factors recorded at assessment for each child
- Sources of referrals
- Special educational needs
- School type
- Free school meal eligibility
- Suspensions and permanent exclusions
- Persistent and severe absence
- Key Stage 2 attainment
- Key Stage 4 attainment and progress
- Age of entry to care
- Legal status for children looked after
- Type and locality of placement for children looked after
- Activity, accommodation and suitability of accommodation for care leavers
- Information on whether care leavers were in touch with the local authority
- Longitudinal analysis looking at a child's journey through the social care system
- Subnational analyses for children in need, children looked after and care leavers
- Breakdowns for the above by recorded disability status and disability type
Users of the data should consider the following:
- During the period 2016 to 2025, new assessment factors were introduced into the social care system, while others were withdrawn. In the tables provided, an ‘x’ indicates the years in which an assessment factor was not available.
- Due to the disruption caused by the impact of Covid-19 during the 2020/21 and 2021/22 academic years, caution should be taken when comparing data to previous years.
- Data for the years ending 31 March 2021 and 2022 is not available for Hackney local authority, therefore 2020 data for Hackney has been included in the 2021 and 2022 national totals and regional totals.
- Data for the year ending 31 March 2024 is not available for Hampshire local authority, therefore 2023 data for Hampshire has been included in the 2024 national and regional totals.
- Data for 2024 is unreliable for the Herefordshire local authority.
- Data for 2024 and 2025 is unreliable for the Merton local authority.
- Local authority reorganisations have taken place during the ten-year period this analysis covers, including:
- from April 2019 the three local authorities ‘Dorset’, ‘Bournemouth’ and ‘Poole’ reorganised into two local authorities ‘Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole’ and ‘Dorset’. As part of this, a small number of children formerly looked after in the Christchurch area of Dorset were transferred to the new authority ‘Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole’
- from April 2021 Northamptonshire split into two local authorities, ‘North Northamptonshire’ and ‘West Northamptonshire’
- from April 2023, Cumbria split into two local authorities, ‘Westmorland and Furness’ and ‘Cumberland’
'No data' is used where a breakdown is not applicable. This may occur where a characteristic is only presented for a specific group. For example, children in need (CIN) without a recorded disability do not have a disability type recorded.
Rounding and suppression
National and regional figures have been rounded to the nearest 10. Local authority figures are unrounded.
Where any number is shown as zero, the original figure submitted was zero.
The following symbols have been used in the releases (to align with GSS standards):
- ‘c’ to protect confidentiality. Secondary suppression may be required
- ‘z’ data not applicable
- ‘x’ data not available
- ‘k’ used for a value that would round to zero but is not zero. For example, where a percentage is <0.5% and values are shown to zero decimal places, or where a percentage is <0.05% and values are shown to one decimal place.
- ‘u’ low reliability
For percentages:
- To protect confidentiality some numbers are replaced by ‘c’
- They may not sum to 100% due to rounding
- They are rounded to whole numbers except in a few instances where they are to one or two decimal places to be consistent with related publications.
For averages:
- The averages, both mean and median, have been rounded to whole numbers or one or two decimal places depending on the source.