Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 11 October 2024 to Question 6377 on Children in Care, whether her Department plans to collect data on the number of children removed from a family who have previously had a child removed from their care.

The department recognises the need to improve the data available about children’s social care, including making it more relevant to the experience of children, young people and families. A core part of this work includes understanding the data needs of the children’s social care sector as a whole and scoping ways in which data gaps may be addressed over time.

Existing statutory data is captured about the child and does not capture the complex nature of families such as those where siblings do not live in the same family home. Addressing data gaps in children’s social care will be a long-term endeavour due to the need to agree data definitions and standards, as well as to redesign local authority and departmental systems before rolling out nationally.