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Children in Care

Volume 470: debated on Tuesday 8 January 2008

To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families how many children were in care at the latest date for which figures are available in the age groups (a) 0 to five, (b) five to nine, (c) nine to 12 and (d) 12 to 16 years. (174305)

The information is provided in table 1 as follows.

Table 1: children looked after at 31 March 2007 by age at 31 March1,2,3

Numbers

Age at 31 March 2007 (years)

All ages

0 to 4

5 to 8

9 to 11

12 to 15

16 and over

All children looked after at 31 March 2007

60,000

11,800

8,300

8,800

19,300

11,800

1 Source: SSDA903 return on children looked after.

2 Figures exclude children looked after under an agreed series of short term placements.

3 To ensure that no individual can be identified from statistical tables, we use conventions for the rounding and suppression of very small numbers. All numbers which appear in national tables have been rounded to the nearest 100 if they exceed 1,000 and to the nearest 10 otherwise. Numbers from 1 to 5 inclusive have been suppressed, being replaced in the table by a hyphen (-). It has been necessary to suppress other figures whenever it would be possible to calculate the value of a suppressed number by a means of simple arithmetic. The rule applied in these circumstances has been to suppress the next smallest data item provided its value is strictly less than 20.