§ Mr. WillisTo ask the Secretary of State for Health how many, and what percentage of children who left(a) a residential care home and (b) foster parents at the age of 16 years were not in education, employment and training at any one time between the ages of 16 to 18 years in the last five years for which figures are available. [61784]
§ Jacqui SmithAt present, the Department does not hold statistics that would allow us to answer this question. Since the introduction of the quality protects programme, individual local authorities should be compiling their own data about the progress of young people who they were looking after on the sixteenth birthday from August 1998, so that they have information about the education and employment outcomes of young people who have been in their care.
734WThe Children (Leaving Care) Act was commenced in October 2001. As part of the arrangements for monitoring the Act, local authorities are now required to submit details to the Department about the education, training and employment of 19-year-old care leavers, who had been looked after in their seventeenth year. The first set of data from this sample will be published in autumn 2002. It would then be possible to match this data with other information about young people's last placement prior to leaving care, to research whether for this cohort of young people there are significant correlations between placement type and education and employment outcomes.
§ Mr. BurstowTo ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to his answer of 17 June 2002,Official Report, column 151W, on children in care, if he will provide such information as the Department has on the numbers of (a) mentally and (b) physically disabled children in care. [63872]
§ Jacqui SmithThe Department carried out a children in need census in February 2000 which showed that in a typical week, there were about 29,000 children who were receiving services and were regarded as disabled, of whom 8,000 were children looked after. This report can be found on the children in need home page of Internet at www.doh.gov.uk/cin/ cin/2000.htm (paragraphs 30–32 refer).
These figures were considered too unreliable to publish at local authority level, because of confusion in some authorities as to whether to include all disabled children or only those who need services by virtue of their disability or disabilities. No further breakdown is made in relation to children who are mentally disabled and/or physically disabled.
§ Mr. BurstowTo ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to his answer of 17 June 2002,Official Report, column 151W, on children in care, which survey the information regarding the number of children in care births came from. [63870]
§ Jacqui SmithThe results of the survey, funded by the Department, were published in 1992 by the national children's bureau under the title "Prepared for living? A survey of young people leaving the care of three local authorities" (authors: N. Biehal et al.). The publication is available in the Library.