Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate her Department has made of the number of children that required social care placements from their local authority in the last 12 months.

The department has not yet published information on the number of children and young people who are looked after during the reporting year ending 31 March 2023. This data will be published in the annual statistical release later this year.

Information on the number of children looked after as at 31 March 2022 and at any point during the 2021/22 reporting year is published in the annual statistical release ‘Children looked after including adoptions’ at the following link: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoptions.