Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, on how many occasions children subject to special guardianship orders and adoption orders have been placed into local authority care under section 20 of the Children Act 1989 in each of the last five years.

The department does not hold information on all the occasions when special guardianship placements or adoptions have broken down. A research report, ‘Beyond the adoption order’, was published in 2014 and gave a one-off insight into adoption breakdown. This report can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/beyond-the-adoption-order-challenges-intervention-disruption.

National statistics on numbers of children in England starting to be looked after who had a previous permanence arrangement, whether a special guardianship order or adoption order, are available at the bottom of Table C1 at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2016-to-2017.

These figures were collected for the first time in 2014 and should be treated with caution as the information is based on self-declaration and for a large number of children the previous permanence arrangement is not known.