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Taking a count of vulnerable children

The effective collection of data on the number and location of vulnerable children is a highly pertinent issue as government guidance has called for the setting up of local strategic partnerships to address a wide definition of children's needs. Researchers Philippa Hare, Martin Baxter and Elizabeth Newbronner report on one children's planning group's attempt to get its sums right.

A principle of the Children Act 1989 is local authorities' duty to promote the welfare of "children in need" and their families. Vulnerable children are defined in draft guidance issued in 2000, opening the way for a multi-agency response to a much wider category of children.¹

The guidance defined vulnerable children as those "who have acquired or encountered some difficulty which requires additional help if their life chances are to be optimised or the risk of social exclusion is to be averted".

The guidance proposes co-ordinated planning for vulnerable children, using local strategic partnerships to "jointly address levels of need, determine priorities, articulate shared objectives and agree targets and milestones".

Accurate and reliable information is fundamental to identifying the needs of local children and the nature of services required to meet those needs. A mapping exercise recently carried out for a children's services planning group in northern England has highlighted some of the challenges involved in sharing information about children between agencies, which is a pre-requisite to joint planning.

The project aimed to estimate the number of vulnerable children in the area and determine their geographical distribution. It also sought to describe the services available to support them and their families, and to identify how many were receiving services from more than one agency.

The project team began by identifying the key services, both statutory and voluntary, which provide support services for "vulnerable children" in the area. It was soon appreciated that not all of these services kept records on individual children. Those which did were asked to provide identifier data for the children known to them whom they considered to be vulnerable. Three identifiers (gender, date of birth and postcode) were selected which would enable the project team to attribute individual children to wards and age bands, while maintaining their anonymity and avoiding double counting.

Organisations were also asked to provide data on the ethnic origin of their clients, as nationally Quality Protects management action plans have been found weak in terms of references to services for children from ethnic minority groups.

The data collected were collated and analysed for the area as a whole, and then separately for each of the 39 local authority wards. The results of the analysis were then compared with the total number of children in the ward, national estimates of the number of vulnerable children, and indicators of deprivation from the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions.

Although the data were incomplete for reasons summarised later, the study yielded some important information. In particular it highlighted those wards in which either a large number, or large proportion, of the child population was accessing services, and those wards which appeared to have disproportionately high levels of need, and which might therefore require more intensive input from services.

Although the results presented few surprises to those working with vulnerable children, it is hoped that the detailed information presented on the different age groups and the use of services will help to inform future planning decisions.

The analysis also indicated that the number of children actually known to services was significantly lower than the number of children estimated as vulnerable. This was further emphasised by the individual ward level figures taken from the DTLR (formerly DETR) Child Poverty Index.² It is acknowledged that some of these children may be recognised as vulnerable by other agencies or groups, for example their school or a voluntary organisation working with their family, but, as much of this data is not held centrally, it was not incorporated in the overall figures for the area. Agencies may need to think about how they share this kind of information at a local level in order to identify vulnerable children at an early stage.

The process of collecting the data for this project highlighted practical issues which have important implications for the work of the new strategic partnerships.

Definitions and the availability of data
Agencies that were asked to supply data for vulnerable children were given the definitions contained in the assessment framework ³ and the draft guidance for children in need. These definitions had not, however, been used by any of the agencies in deciding which children were recorded. Agencies categorised children in many different ways. Some took the view that a child was automatically vulnerable if she or he was being seen by them. Others used categories based on their statutory responsibilities (for example, children who were in need, looked-after, on the child protection register, or statemented). Some voluntary agencies recorded all families who came to them for advice, so they were self-defined as opposed to being professionally assessed as in need or vulnerable.

In those organisations which held information centrally, retrieval was relatively straightforward. In those which did not, the individual caseloads of staff had to be collated. This was naturally more time-consuming, and possibly less accurate than centrally collected information as staff who were asked to do the job had other priorities.

Some agencies, such as counselling services, saw many of their clients through self-referral. As many clients did not know, or did not wish to give, their postcode, the data they provided was inevitably incomplete. Information about the ethnic origin of children appeared to be routinely collected only by the social services department and the NSPCC in the survey area.

Some of the data provided was incorrect. For example, up to 6 per cent of the postcodes provided by one of the larger agencies were invalid. Dates of birth were incomplete in the data provided by at least one of the other organisations. Some agencies provided data which contained several sets of the same identifier indicators, suggesting that individuals had been recorded more than once.

Information regarding the children who lived in families with less than half the average household income was not available from the local Benefits Agency, as they could not discern from their database which of the income support claimants had dependants. Data from education departments about children in receipt of free school meals was used as a proxy for low income, though it is collected in school catchment areas rather than wards.

Most organisations could provide their data electronically, making input to a common database relatively simple. Some, however, were only able to supply their data on paper, making manual input into the common database necessary which was a time-consuming and error prone task.

Confidentiality
Attitudes to confidentiality varied substantially between organisations in both the statutory and voluntary sectors. Most organisations were willing to pass on the data requested once they had been given appropriate assurances about how the data would be treated. Some, however, felt able to provide only limited data; these could not then be used to check for double-counting or to attribute children to wards.

Others took the view that they could only release the requested data if the parents of the children had given written permission. Though this view was respected, such an approach obviously reduced response rates, while at the same time risking raising fears unnecessarily among parents as to how the data would be used. Within the NHS, the Caldicott guidelines govern the release of confidential information.⁴ However, even here there is clearly room for interpretation, as one of the local health providers released the information in full, while the other would not do so without parental permission.

The study has highlighted a number of issues which may be particularly pertinent to those involved in the new strategic partnerships. In the light of our experience, it would seem sensible for partnerships to agree a set of ground rules before starting the process of mapping the vulnerable children in their area. We suggest that these should include:

The definitions and categories to be used for vulnerable children.

A common data set, covering, at the minimum, date of birth, gender, full postcode and ethnicity.

Systems to ensure that data are reliable, complete, and easily retrievable by administrative staff.

Joint policies and protocols on confidentiality.

Philippa Hare is senior research officer, Martin Baxter is project officer, and Elizabeth Newbronner is director at primary care consultant Acton.Shapiro

References

¹ Department of Health. Draft for Consultation, New Guidance for Children's Services Planning Consultation document issued with LASSL (2000), April 2000

² Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, Indices of Deprivation 2000: Ward Level Presentations, Index team at Oxford University for the DTLR (formerly DETR) 2000

³ Department of Health, Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families, Stationery Office, 2000

⁴ Department of Health, The Protection and Use of Patient Information, HSG (96) 18/LASSL (96) 5, DoH, March 1996

Websites

1 Draft guidance (reference 1) at www.doh.gov.uk/pdfs/cspconsultation.pdf

2 Indices of Deprivation (reference 2) at www.statistics.gov.uk/neighbourhood/metadata18.htm    

3 Assessment framework (reference 3) at www.doh.gov.uk/scg/cin.htm