| Information on Looked
After Children
at 31st March 1997 and 1998
1. INTRODUCTION
Background to Looked after Children in Scotland
Local Authorities have responsibilities under the Children
(Scotland) Act 1995 to provide support to vulnerable young people. Some children will be
looked after for only a short period of time; others may be looked after for several short
periods of time and some for substantial periods of time. Local authority Social Work
departments regularly review the range of provision of services made for an individual
child.
Legislation
The relevant provisions of The Children (Scotland) Act 1995
came into operation on 1st April 1997. Previously local authorities had similar
responsibilities under the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968. This Information Note spans
the period of operation of the old and the new legislation and, amongst other changes,
there was a change in terminology and philosophy associated with the 1995 Act. Children
were previously referred to as ‘Children in care or under supervision; the
terminology is now ‘Children Looked After’. The phrase ‘Children in Care/
Looked After’ is used in this Information Note to identify information that relates
to periods prior to 31st March 1997 and to 1st April 1997 onwards.
The range of provision
Local authorities make a wide range of services available
for looked after children. This Information Note only covers the type of accommodation
that is provided.
The data
Information in this note is based on data that was
collected by the Statistics Branch of Social Work Services Group, The Scottish Office.
Authorities completed a brief aggregate return covering the two financial years of
operation of the new unitary authorities, 1996/97 and 1997/98. The return collected
information on the number, gender, age bands and accommodation arrangements for Children
in Care/ Looked After at 31st March 1997 and 31st March 1998.
In previous years detailed individual child level data on
children in care was collected. The introduction of The Children (Scotland) Act 1995
resulted in changes which have led to a need to reconsider, and substantially revise, the
data collection relating to looked after children. Additionally local government
re-organisation meant an inevitable discontinuity in the information gathering systems of
the outgoing regions and the incoming unitary authorities. At national level there were
difficulties in processing the detailed information that was previously collected. The
result is that the last published data on children in care related to 1993.
This Information Note contains information at national
level about children looked after (1997/98) and children in care (1996/97). Some
information from earlier publications is included for comparison purposes.
Annex 1 is a listing for individual authorities of the
numbers of girls and boys looked after at 31st March 1998 and the full set of
data which was collected is freely available as an electronic file. This may be obtained
by directly downloading from the Statistics page of The Scottish Office web site or on
disc by contacting the address on page 4.
In some cases authorities have been able to provide only
partial data on age, gender and / or accommodation breakdowns of Children in Care / Looked
After. Where this is the case breakdowns have been estimated and are included in the
national figures given in the Information Note. |
