Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to report entitled Improving agency data on child sexual abuse: A pilot study of the child sexual abuse, published by the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse in July 2019, if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of local authorities reportable data in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation.

The department welcomes the publication of the report ‘Improving agency data on child sexual abuse’ by the Centre of Expertise and will take into consideration its valuable recommendations. A small amount of the data, on child sexual abuse and exploitation in scope of the report, is reported centrally to the department. These are additional factors collected at the end of a child protection assessment, identified and recorded in the Children in Need census. They are published in Table C3 of the statistical release, ‘Characteristics of children in need tables: 2018’. This can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/characteristics-of-children-in-need-2017-to-2018.

Factors identified at the end of the assessment were collected and reported for the first time in the year in 2013 to 2014. Initially, data was only published at a national level due to some concerns about its quality: this is common when new data items are introduced to collections and consistency in local reporting needs to be established. The quality has improved as the data item has ‘bedded in’, and the data is now published at national and local authority level. More than one factor can be identified for each episode of need and as there are 39 factors we publish additional guidance to aid local authorities in submitting this data.

We continue to work with local authorities on the data quality as we are aware of the interest in the contextual information provided by this data item, especially in areas such as child exploitation and sexual abuse.