BN 981977-1991Department of Health and Social Security: Children's Division: Children in Care Datasets
The Children in Care (CIC) datasets provide information about children in the care of local authorities, who are currently referred to as being 'looked after'. The element 'looked after' is a term which is defined in the Children Act 1989, and replaces the former designation of 'children in care'. The records are in the form of individual anonymised, coded care histories of each individual child, organised in the format of 'care episodes'. A new 'care episode' is initiated whenever there is a change in the placement or legal status of a child. The data in the CIC database covers the 15 statistical years from 1977 to 1991 inclusive, and covers both England and Wales. A 'statistical year', in the CIC database, is defined as a financial year, running from 1 April to 31 March inclusive (i.e. the 1977 statistical year runs from 1 April 1976 to 31 March 1977). Data for the years from 1 April 1991 are not stored in this database.
The Department of Health produced annual statistical reports on children in care each financial year, which are available in the dataset documentation catalogue. However it is important to note that the data had not fully accrued by the time these reports were printed, and so as a result the statistics in the published reports cannot be reproduced from the data. In 1997, statistics for the years 1979 - 1991 were generated and output. These statistics are unpublished and are presently held by the Department of Health. They contain estimated data for those local authorities which had returns missing from the final version of the data after full accrual. The origin of these estimates is unknown, and the Department of Health have been unable to provide us with further information regarding this. The Department have stated in their report that:
'it is known that the published statistics for a number of years were based on early estimates and had been superseded on the main frame by more accurate and complete data, as reflected in the reports run off in 1991. These reports, rather than the contemporary publications, should therefore be regarded as the most accurate source of data'.
The datasets in this series are available to download. Links to individual datasets can be found at piece level.
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