On 12 December 2024 the Children’s Commissioner published a new Report as to the deaths of Children In Need. The Commissioner’s site notes:
“This report contains new findings on the deaths of children in need. ‘Child in need’ is an umbrella term including looked after children, children on a child protection plan, and children on a child in need plan. This report examines the characteristics of children and young people who die having had social care involvement, and how they compare to all child deaths. The Children’s Commissioner’s office recognises that each of the data points analysed in this report represent the tragic loss of a child, and so the report ends with recommendations, including on how to create a better system of understanding child deaths, and hopefully preventing, future deaths.
This research shines light on the specific risks faced by children known to children’s social care, lack of information sharing between services, and limited contact with children’s services professionals. Fundamentally, children known to social care are five times more likely to die due to deliberately inflicted injury, abuse or neglect, meaning we are doing too little to protect them.
The Children’s Commissioner is calling for:
-
- A change in the law that gives children equal protection from physical assault to adults. The current defence of reasonable chastisement or punishment to a charge of assault on a child should be removed – sometimes referred to as a ‘smacking ban’. This would bring England in line with the rest of Great Britain. It would not create a new offence but would give children equal protection from violence as adults.
- Schools to be at centre of safeguarding arrangements. Schools should be the fourth statutory safeguarding partner, in recognition of their role in protecting the children who they see every day and the additional insights and data they can contribute about vulnerable young people. They should continue to maintain accountability for children for a year when they are removed from school to be home educated.
- Greater oversight of home-educated children. No child who has ever been known to children’s social care due to concerns around abuse or neglect should be taken out of school for the purposes of being home educated without the prior agreement of the local authority. For children with a social worker or for whom there is a live referral to children’s social care, home education should not be permitted.
- A register of children not in school to be implemented urgently. This must include children who are home educated and be introduced via legislation as a matter of urgency, backed by the resource to effectively implement and monitor it.
- Improved data sharing: A shared unique child identifier should be introduced and, in the first instance, the government’s upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill should stipulate what data should be proactively shared with safeguarding partners. That should include ensuring Border Force data is shared with local authorities and schools when children leave and enter the country.
- National thresholds of need for children in need. Through a review of the Children Act 1989, there should be national guidance set out that defines consistent thresholds of need that children and families must meet to be offered support through a child in need plan, under section 17.
The report concludes with further recommendations on how the current system of recording, reporting and learning from the deaths of children in need could be made more effective”.
Within the Main Report, the Executive summary notes:
- “Deliberately inflicted injuries, abuse or neglect account for 2.1% of child deaths in England…
- Available evidence is not good enough to say whether the trend is up or down…
- New analysis for this report estimates that deaths of children in need in 2018-19 to 2022-23 were four times more likely to be due to deliberately inflicted injury, abuse or neglect than the deaths of children without any social care involvement. These children were ‘children in need’ but were not looked after, and were not on child protection plans, meaning they may have been awaiting an assessment, being assessed, or on a child in need plan. Children previously known to social services, but not at the time of their death, were even more likely to die for these reasons – six times more likely than children not known to services. These findings are only exploratory but indicate that children with intensive types of social care involvement may be being effectively safeguarded from the most lethal abuse and neglect, with the risk instead falling on children with lesser or previous involvement.
- New analysis for this report estimates that children in need make up a disproportionately large percentage of all child deaths. This proportion may be growing.
- New analysis for this report finds that children in need’s mortality risk appears to have grown over time. Between 2014 and 2023, there was a 51% increase in the number of deaths of children in need, but an increase of only 1% in the number of these children. Increasing numbers of children who are children in need due to their disabilities and health conditions cannot explain this rise, nor can the increasing number of looked after children among the children in need. This implies an urgent need to investigate the reasons for this increase…
- Data quality is limited and more research is needed to confirm and explain these patterns…”
The Children’s Commissioner’s Press Release can be accessed here.
The full Report can be accessed here.
Original reporting by Family Law Week