Series details: CRDA/38

The Department of Health (DOH) collects data relating to children in the care of social services, from all local authorities with social service responsibilities. The dataset provides information about children in the care of local authorities, who are currently referred to as being 'looked after'. From this data the Department of Health produced annual statistical reports on children in care each financial year.

The Department of Health collects the data relating to children in the care of social services, from all local authorities with social service responsibilities. For the period up to 31 March 1991, the Department collected this data from all local authorities in England and Wales. (From the year beginning 1 April 1991, which is outside the scope of the present database, the Department has collected this data from local authorities in England only).

The data relating to children in care was collected from local authorities on the SSDA 903 form. The data in the Children in Care (CIC) database was originally stored and processed on a large mainframe system operated by The Department of Health and Social Security(DHSS) at Norcross near Blackpool. When the Departments of Health and Social Security were split, in 1987, ownership of the data was transferred to The Department of Social Security (DSS), which continued to process the CIC data under contract to the Department of Health. When the 1989 Children Act came into force (during the 1991/92 statistical year) the CIC data was archived. It was retained by DSS at Norcross, however, as they were continuing to provide a service to the Department of Health, processing the new style 'Children Looked After' dataset using a re-designed 'CLA' database. In 1997 the processing of data on looked after children was transferred to a Client Server system based in the Department of Health at Skipton House in London. At the same time the archived CIC data was transferred to the Department of Health on an optical disk for storage and future use. This data has since been transferred to a CD-ROM. For further information about the Department of Health see Administrative History of the Department of Health.

The dataset provides information about children in the care of local authorities, who are currently referred to as being 'looked after'. 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, reference CRDA/38/DD/1. 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 (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/1/DD/38/1) 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'.

For all years from 1977 to 1991 the numbers of children in care at 31 March, as derived from the electronic database, have been compared with the printed reports and the published statistics. NDAD has produced the table below, which incorporates the table produced by the Department of Health documenting these discrepancies, and can be seen in this catalogue in Validation performed after transfer.

Accruals of the Children in Care database cover the 15 statistical years from 1977 to 1991 inclusive, and cover both England and Wales. Further accruals of the CIC database are not expected as CIC was archived and after the 1989 Children Act a new style dataset was designed called the 'Children Looked After' (CLA) dataset. NDAD has yet to decide whether this will be a different series to CIC.

The Children in Care dataset and related dataset documentation are public records under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. The National Archives has assigned the dataset and documents the class BN 98.

Access to certain fields is closed. See the dataset catalogues for details.

The Children in Care Database and related dataset documentation are Crown Copyright. Copies may be made for private study and research purposes only.

The data is subject to registration under the Data Protection Act,1998, subject to access exemption under section 33 of the Data Protection Act.

The language of the materials is English.

Documents relating to the Children in Care Database have been transferred to NDAD and can be consulted via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

The data in the Children in Care (CIC) database was originally stored and processed on a large mainframe system operated by the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) (as it then was) at Norcross near Blackpool. When the Departments of Health and Social Security were split, in 1987, ownership of the mainframe was transferred to the Department of Social Security (DSS), which continued to process the CIC data under contract to the Department of Health. When the 1989 Children Act came into force (during the 1991/92 statistical year) the CIC data was archived. It was retained by DSS at Norcross, however, as they were continuing to provide a service to the Department of Health, processing the new style 'Children Looked After' dataset using a re-designed 'CLA' database. In 1997 the processing of data on looked after children was transferred to a Client Server system based in the Department of Health at Skipton House in London. At the same time the archived CIC data was transferred to the Department of Health on an optical disk for storage and future use. This data has since been transferred to a CD-ROM.

Various operating systems were used during the period from 1977 to 1997 - George 3, DME and VME.

The database was migrated from its original mainframe format to Microsoft Access format in 1997.

The dataset consists of two tables: CHILD (Data Relating to the Child) and EPISODE (Data Relating to the Care Episode) which are linked by LA (Local Authority) and Child_ID fields.

The data is closed, in the sense that it is not overwritten when added to.

The data was supplied on an annual basis by English local authorities, on magnetic media or paper submissions. Inputs by tape were received in ICL VME, ICL George, IBM EBCDIC or ISO standard formats. The paper inputs were keyed using a PCK process. The processing of the data was done by a COBOL validation system. All validation was performed on an ICL 1900 (1970's), 2900 and ICL 3900 (1990's) mainframes.

As stated previously, for all years from 1977 to 1991 the numbers of children in care at 31 March, as derived from the electronic database, have been compared with the printed reports and the published statistics. NDAD has produced the table below, which incorporates the table produced by the Department of Health documenting these discrepancies. Several further discrepancies were discovered when validation checks were carried out on the transferred data. See the table below for details of these discrepanices. Further details of the content and transformation validation checks performed by NDAD staff on the dataset derived from the Children in Care Database are contained in the relevant Dataset Catalogue: see Links to dataset catalogues.

*Isles of Scilly - in published tables this authority is either omitted, or figures are zero, or figures are included with those for Cornwall.

**These are non-existent authorities.

When the data is compared with the annual published Statistical Reports (see Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/38/DD/1/1), it can be seen that the local authorities for which there is no data are dealt with as follows:

• for years 1977-1984 the published reports contain zeros in place of data from missing local authorities
• for years 1985-1986 the published reports contain blanks in place of data from missing local authorities.
• for years 1987-1991 the published reports appear to have replaced missing data with data from a previous year (the same local authority). In most cases (but not all), the year is stated in brackets after the name of the local authority.

It is stated in the published reports, for years 1985-1991, that the data for the Isles of Scilly has been included with the Cornwall local authority data. However, for years 1977-1985 this is not stated, so it is not clear whether the figures for the Isles of Scilly are actually zero, or whether they have been omitted.

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):