This page is a guide to the serious incident notifications official statistics release published by the Department for Education (DfE). It sets out information on:
The Children Act 2004 (as amended by the Children and Social Work Act 2017) states that where a local authority in England knows or suspects that a child has been abused or neglected, the local authority must notify the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (the Panel), and by extension the Department and Ofsted, if:
(a) the child dies or is seriously harmed in the local authority’s area, or
(b) while normally resident in the local authority’s area, the child dies or is seriously harmed outside England.
The local authority must also notify the Secretary of State and Ofsted where a looked after child has died, whether or not abuse or neglect is known or suspected.
The statutory duty to notify the Panel came into effect from 29 June 2018. Prior to this, notifications were made to Ofsted.
Serious harm includes (but is not limited to) serious and/or long-term impairment of a child’s mental health or intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development. It also covers impairment of physical health.
The data shows the number of incidents reported in the period, rather than the number of incidents that occurred in the period. The data is based on single notifiable incidents, which can relate to more than one child in some instances.
The local authority should notify the Panel within 5 working days of becoming aware that the incident has occurred. However, we know that in some cases, there is a delay in notifications being submitted. 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.
Local authorities notify the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (the Panel) of serious incidents via the Child Safeguarding Incident Notification System. This replaced the previous online form which notified Ofsted. The local authority should notify the Panel within 5 working days of becoming aware that the incident has occurred. The online system stores the information submitted by the local authority and this can be accessed by the Panel, the Department for Education (the Department) and Ofsted.
The Child Safeguarding Incident Notification System automatically notifies the Department of an incident, and officials manually classify the incident based on the information contained in the notification. The details of each notification are stored by the Department.
If a notification form has missing or inaccurate data entries, the Department will request clarification from the local authority. Any subsequent changes to the data are logged by the Department.
Where some local authorities incorrectly categorise the nature of incident as ‘other’, the Department will change this to death or serious harm.
The data is aggregated by characteristics such as age group, ethnicity, and incident type, for the purpose of internal reporting. This allows officials to alert ministers to emerging concerns about particular trends.
The data is quality assured by the Department at both the categorisation and the aggregation stage. Where information is missing, or in cases where there is clearly an error, the Department contacts the local authority for clarification.
The Department has been responsible for the production and publication of the statistics for four years now and data quality has improved since 29 June 2018 following the statutory duty coming into effect on local authorities to notify the Panel of serious incidents. Prior to this, notifications were made to Ofsted.
The Department in recent years has been working more closely with local authorities to increase awareness and familiarisation with the reporting system and to address data issues where necessary. For example, contacting local authorities where applicable to ensure categorical data is recorded accurately.
The process of notifying serious incidents has now been running for a number of years, and local authorities are generally familiar with the requirements and content of the notification system.
Users should read all footnotes and caveats presented in this release to fully understand the practical applications and limitations of the data.
When using the data consider:
The main users of serious incident notification data are:
Other known users of the data are:
Rounding and suppression is applied to the data. The Code of Practice for Statistics 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 totals.
Where any number is shown as zero, the original figure submitted was zero.
These statistics have been published as official statistics for the first time within this release, whereas previously they were classified as experimental statistics. Further information on the different types of official statistic is available on the website of the UK Statistics Authority. The rationale to publish these statistics as official statistics is as follows:
The serious incident notifications publication is produced using a final version of the dataset. The department does not plan to make any revisions to the publication. If it is later discovered that a revision is necessary, this will be made in accordance with the DfE statistical policy statement on revisions.
If you have a specific enquiry about Serious incident notifications statistics and data:
If you have a media enquiry:
Telephone: 020 7783 8300
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Telephone: 037 0000 2288
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