I was rather irritated this morning by a piece in yesterday's Guardian - page 15 of the print edition about children in care, in which there was a rather loud box saying that there were 400,000 children in social care in England, of which 84,000 were being looked after by local authorities.
400,000 seemed rather a lot given that I thought that the population of the UK was of the order of 70m people, quite a lot more than when I had to do with such things back in the early 1970s. But I thought I had better check, to get the unsolicited offering from Copilot snapped above. This was rather alarming, so I thought I had better check properly, and got myself to reference 2, from which I learn that my original thought was about right. But 400,000 is still a lot of children.
Digging into that took me to reference 1, where it turned out that the 400,000 figure was right enough, but that the gloss was misleading, to say the least of it.
Roughly speaking, a child is anyone up to the age of 18 - but may include the unborn and may include young people older than 18. Again, roughly speaking, you score if you are in need of support of some kind from your local authority - and around 3% of our children do so score.
There is some confusion at the edges between children in need at any point in time, episodes of need during some period and referrals during some period.
But having some need for support is rather badly glossed by being 'in social care'.
Fortunately, there is plenty of rather better information at reference 1, from which the snap above is taken.
None of this should be taken as disturbing the truth that the system for looking after very needy children looks to be in need of repair. And it is not at all clear that contracting out large chunks of it to the private sector has been very successful - and it is certainly very expensive.
References
Reference 1: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-in-need/2025.
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