Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many incidents of alleged child abuse were reported to local authorities in each of the last 12 months; and how many of those reports were escalated to become safeguarding issues.

The information requested is not held centrally. However, published data on referrals is distributed annually in the statistical first release ‘Characteristics of children in need’, which is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/characteristics-of-children-in-need-2016-to-2017.