Special Guardianship Orders

(asked on 25th September 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many Special Guardianship Orders have been (a) initiated and (b) terminated in each of the last ten years; and how many and what proportion of children subject to those Special Guardianship Orders have been placed with grandparents.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 4th October 2019

Figures on the number of looked-after children who were made the subject of a Special Guardianship order during the year in each of the last 5 years are published in Tables D1 and E5 of the statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2017 to 2018’ at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2017-to-2018. Figures for earlier years are published in table D1 in previous releases Statistics: looked-after children - GOV.UK. Regarding details on whether the guardians are grandparents, this information is not held centrally.

Regarding details on whether a special guardianship is terminated, this information is not held centrally and is not collected. Figures on the number of children starting to be looked-after, having previously been the subject of a special guardianship order, are published in Table C1 of the statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2017 to 2018’ at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2017-to-2018, These figures have only been collected since 2014-15 and caution should be used when interpreting this data as there is a high proportion of unknowns.

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