Reporting year 2025

Children looked after in England including adoptions

Children looked after, care leavers and children adopted in England. Annual statistics including characteristics, placement information and health outcomes.

Latest release

Next release

All releases in this series
Download all data (ZIP)Create your own tables
Release type
Published
Last updated
1 updatefor Reporting year 2025
UK statistics authority quality mark

On this page

Skip in page navigation

Explore data used in this release

This page provides a range of routes to access data from within this statistical release to suit different users.

Download all data (ZIP)

This includes all data sets, guidance files and any supporting files

More options

  • Featured tables

    Featured tables are pre-prepared tables created from a statistical release's data sets. They provide statistics that are regularly requested by users and can be adapted to switch between different categories.

  • Data sets: download or create tables

    Data sets present comprehensive open data from which users can create their own tables using the EES table tool or download a zipped CSV file.

  • Data guidance

    Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

  • Data catalogue

    Alternatively use our data catalogue to search and filter for specific data sets from this release or our entire library, providing full data summaries, data previews and access to API data sets.

Data sets: download or create tables

Data sets present comprehensive open data from which users can create their own tables using the EES table tool or download a zipped CSV file.

45 data sets available for download

Download all (ZIP)
Back to top

Data guidance

Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

Description

This document describes the data included in the ‘Children looked after in England including adoptions: 2024 to 2025’ National Statistics release’s underlying data files. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License (opens in new tab)and is intended to meet at least three stars for Open Data (opens in new tab).

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 data is produced.

A guide (opens in a new tab) (opens in new tab)for the data collection provides further information on the data collected.

Coverage

This data is based upon information collected in the SSDA903 (CLA) data collection. It is a child level dataset collected from local authorities in England annually. The data includes information on: 

  • children looked after on 31 March in each year, including unaccompanied asylum seeking children
  • children looked after at any time
  • children who started to be looked after
  • children who ceased to be looked after
  • children looked after who were adopted
  • care leavers now aged 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 years old
  • care leavers now aged 22, 23, 24 and 25 years old (from 2023 onwards)
  • children who went missing or away from placement without authorisation
  • stability (of placements, schools and social workers)

 The longitudinal nature of the collection means historical information can be amended each year, so we update all time series figures published in each release.  Unless otherwise stated, numbers and percentage exclude children looked after under an agreed  series of short term placements. 

Users of the data should consider the following:

  • for some local authorities, the figures may be impacted by large numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and their distinctive characteristics
  • from April 2021 Northamptonshire split into two local authorities, ‘North Northamptonshire’ and ‘West Northamptonshire’
  • from April 2023 Cumbria split into two local authorities, ‘Westmoreland and Furness’ and ‘Cumberland’
  • There may be a small amount of double counting in start and ceased figures as some children cease to be looked after in one local authority as their care transfers to another local authority. For non-unaccompanied asylum-seeking children this number is fairly consistent each year, however as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are more likely to have their care transferred, the number of children transferring has increased as the number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children has increased. See the methodology document for further information.
  • Information on children who are missing or who are away from their placement without authorisation are published as Official Statistics. Users should refer to the methodology guide when using this data and should be cautious interpreting any figures across years or between local authorities due to differing practices. Hackney did not provide any missing or away without authorisation data in 2021.
  • Information on the school and social worker stability of children are published as Official Statistics. The latest published data for school stability is for CLA on 31 March 2024 and can be found in the 2024 publication. This will be updated in June 2026. The latest published data for social worker stability is for CLA on 31 March 2024 and can be found in the publication ‘Stability measures for children looked after in England’. Users should refer to the methodology guide when using this data.
  • Care leaver data is reported in two distinct groups; young people aged 17-21 years old and young people aged 22-25 years old. For care leavers aged 17-21 years old, the local authority has a duty to be in touch and support the young person. For care leavers aged 22-25 years old, the local authority is expected to provide support if the young person choses to contact them and requests support. Users should be cautious when drawing conclusions from the data for 22-25 year olds as the activity/accommodation data is only available for those young people who contacted the LA and requested and received support. For older care leavers, this cohort may be small.
  • From 28 April 2023, supported accommodation providers in England were able to register with Ofsted and it became illegal for a supported accommodation provider to operate if they had not submitted a complete application which had been accepted by 28 October 2023. For 2024, figures in the category 'Independent and semi-independent living arrangements/supported accommodation' include young people, before 28 October 2023, who were placed in former semi independent living accommodation or who formerly lived independently, and also young people in placements from 28 April 2023 onwards at a provider that had submitted a complete application to Ofsted to operate as a supported accommodation provider by the deadline. Former semi-independent and former independent living providers who did not submit a completed application that was accepted by Ofsted by the end of 27 October 2023 who continued to provide placements are classified as ‘Other placements’ from 28 October 2023 onwards.

File formats and conventions

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 release:

  • ‘c’ to protect confidentiality. Secondary suppression may have been applied
  • ‘z’ for not applicable
  • ‘x’ for not available
  • ‘k’ used for a value that would round to zero but is not zero, for example where a percentage is <0.5% 

For percentages:

  • where the numerator or denominator is small then the figure is replaced by ‘c’
  • they may not sum to 100% due to rounding
  • they are rounded to whole numbers

Also in the release:

  • the average duration for adoptions (formerly table E2) are rounded to the nearest month and are shown in the format yy:mm
  • the average number of missing or away without authorisation incidents (formerly in table G1) have been rounded to one decimal place.
Back to top

Contact us

If you have a specific enquiry about Children looked after in England including adoptions statistics and data:

Looked-after children statistics team

Email: cla.stats@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Justin Ushie

Press office

If you have a media enquiry:

Telephone: 020 7783 8300

Public enquiries

If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:

Phone: 0370 000 2288

Opening times

Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 5.30pm (closed on bank holidays)

Back to top