Financial year 2022-23

Serious incident notifications

Annual statistics for England on serious incidents that involve death or serious harm to a child due to abuse or neglect, and any death of a looked-after child.

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  • National, including characteristics

    National

    Number of serious incident notifications for each financial year, broken down by the following: - nature of notification; - gender; - age; - ethnicity; - disability; - placement type; - whether child has a child protection plan; - whether child known to any agency; - financial year quarter.

    Number of rows
    385
    Indicators
    • Number of serious incident notifications
    Filters
    • Nature of serious incident notification
    • Characteristic type
    • Financial year quarter
    Time period
    2018-19 to 2022-23
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  • Region and local authority totals

    Local authority, National, Regional

    Number of serious incident notifications for each financial year, by local authority and region. PLEASE NOTE: Neither high nor low numbers of serious incident notifications alone should be interpreted as a performance measure of the local authority or its workforce. When interpreting data on serious incident notifications, local authority contextual information is an important consideration. Local authorities with larger populations tend to be more likely to report more serious incident notifications than those with smaller populations. Those with higher levels of deprivation also tend to be more likely to report higher rates of serious incident notifications than those with lower levels of deprivation. In addition, whilst reporting has improved in recent years, the Department is aware that, in some instances, not all incidents that meet the definition for a serious incident are notified, particularly those relating to serious harm. Data relating to population size, the number of children in need and deprivation have been included to provide further contextual information to the data on serious incident notifications.

    Number of rows
    816
    Indicators
    • Number of serious incident notifications
    • Number of children in need at 31 March
    • IDACI average score in 2019
    Time period
    2018-19 to 2022-23
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  • Commentary - Figure 1

    National

    Total number of serious incident notifications for each financial year.

    Number of rows
    9
    Indicators
    • Serious incident notifications
    Time period
    2014-15 to 2022-23
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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 guidance describes the data included in the official statistics release on serious incident notifications. 

This data is released under the terms of the Open Government Licence (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least 3 stars for Open Data (opens in new tab). 

The methodology page should be referenced alongside this data.

Coverage

This release contains statistics on serious incidents involving children that local authorities have notified the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (opens in new tab) about. 

Notifiable serious incidents are those that involve death or serious harm to a child where abuse or neglect is known or suspected, and any death of a looked after child.

Rounding and suppression

Rounding and suppression is applied to the data. The Code of Practice for Statistics (opens in new tab) requires that reasonable steps should be taken to ensure that all published or disseminated statistics protect confidentiality. The publication follows the DfE policy statement on confidentiality. 

Regional numbers have been rounded to the nearest 10. National and local authority numbers are unrounded. As a result of rounding, regional numbers may not sum to national totals.

Symbols

The following symbols are used in the underlying data files as follows: 

     c     to protect confidentiality - secondary suppression may also be applied to figures to protect confidentiality

     x      data not available 

Where any number is shown as zero, the original figure submitted was zero.

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Contact us

If you have a specific enquiry about Serious incident notifications statistics and data:

Children’s Services Statistics Team

Email: sin.stats@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Andy Brook

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)

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