Looked after children

Approximate read time: 5 minutes

1. Local authorities’ responsibilities for children’s social care

As defined by the Children’s Society, “simply put, children’s social care refers to all forms of personal care for children and young people who need extra support”.^[1]

The Children Act 1989 contains a number of statutory duties concerning children’s social care which local authorities are required to follow. These include:

• a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children within their area by providing appropriate services
• a duty to make enquiries to determine whether action is needed to protect a child from significant harm
• powers to apply to court for an order to place a child in the care of a local authority in certain circumstances
• a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of looked after children and provide them with accommodation

In 2024–25 local authorities in England spent £15.5bn on children’s social care, an increase of £297mn in real terms on 2023–24.^[2] This increase was predominantly driven by a real terms increase of £322mn (4.0%) spent on looked after children.^[3]

As at 31 March 2024, there were 81,770 children looked after by local authorities in England, a reduction of 2% on the figure to 2024.^[4] This definition includes children provided with accommodation for a continuous period of more than 24 hours, subject to a care order or subject to a placement order.^[5] The current rate of looked after children on 31 March 2025 is 67 children looked after per 10,000 children—down from 69 per 10,000 last year, although the number and rates of looked after children vary widely across local authorities.^[6]

2. Who are looked after children?

Department for Education figures provide information about the characteristics of looked after children, although they note that “many of the changes in characteristics seen in recent years have been as a result of the change in the number of UASC [unaccompanied asylum-seeking children] who are a distinct cohort with specific characteristics”.^[7] In 2025, there were 6,540 UASC, a decrease of 12% from 7,440 in the previous year. This figure represented 8% of looked after children. Most UASC are male (94%) and older—90% of UASC were aged 16 years or older, compared to 27% of all looked after children.

Figures which exclude UASC show that the greatest proportion of looked after children were older, 40% being aged 10 to 15 years, compared to 5% aged under one year and 13% aged one to four years. While this proportion of most age groups has been relatively stable, the number of those aged over 16 years has been gradually increasing.^[8] Looked after non-UASC were more likely to be of white ethnicity (77%), meaning white ethnicities were over-represented in this group compared to the overall population. However, when including UASC compared with the overall child population, those from mixed ethnic groups were over-represented in numbers of looked after children, while those from Asian ethnic groups were under-represented.

In 2025, the most common reason reported for being taken into care for all children was abuse or neglect (67%) followed by family dysfunction (12%) and absent parenting (8%) and proportions reported have remained relatively stable over the last five years.

The majority of looked after children, around 67%, were placed in foster placements, where an approved carer looks after the child. Children’s homes (including secure children’s homes) accommodated 12% of looked after children; the number of looked after children placed in children’s homes, including secure children’s homes, increased by 9% (770 children) to 9,480 compared to 2024. The proportion of placements outside a local authority’s boundary was 44%, a small decrease from 45% in 2024.

3. Issues with the children’s social care system

Several reports have identified issues with the way the children’s social care system is functioning. These include the ‘Independent review of children’s social care: Final report’, the ‘Final report of the Competition and Markets Authority’s market study into children’s social care’ and the ‘Review into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo Hughes and Star Hobson’ by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, all published in 2022.

The reports’ findings highlighted the growing number of children entering care and the rising cost of providing care. They included calls for improvements in child protection, providing early family help to struggling families, improvements for kinship carers and addressing the children’s care home market.

More recently, research produced for the Local Government Association in May 2025 highlighted the increasing number of high-cost placements for children in care costing over £0.5mn a year per child. It said these had increased from 120 to 1,500 between 2018 and 2023,^[9] and argued these were “causing significant concern and financial strain on local authorities, with little improvement in outcomes for children”.^[10]

On 10 July 2025 the House of Commons Education Committee published the outcome of its inquiry, started before the 2024 general election, into the children’s social care sector.^[11] This stated:

Increases in need coupled with stretched budgets and a lack of serious attention to reform have resulted in a system characterised by spiralling costs to local authorities and poor experiences and outcomes for children.^[12]

The committee highlighted “severe shortages of appropriate placements” leading to rising numbers of children being placed far from their local authorities, and concerns about the state of the children’s social care market.^[13] The report included recommendations on several issues such as child protection plans, providing for those children leaving care and reform of the children’s social care market.

The costs of looked after children in residential care were also examined in the National Audit Office (NAO) report ‘Managing children’s residential care’, published on 12 September 2025.^[14] The report noted the increase in local authority costs of supporting looked after children in residential care. Between 2019–20 and 2023–24, these had increased by 96% to £3.1bn. It highlighted the “widely recognised” challenges in providing “the right residential care, in the right locations, and at the right cost”.^[15] Following on from the NAO report, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee is currently running an inquiry into the financial stability of children’s care homes.^[16]

4. What is the government doing?

The 2024 Labour Party manifesto included a commitment to “work with local government to support children in care, including through kinship, foster care, and adoption, as well as strengthening regulation of the children’s social care sector”.^[17]

In December 2024, the government introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently in the House of Lords, which includes a number of provisions relating to looked after children. Responding to a written question on the NAO report, the government welcomed the report and its recommendations, arguing “many of the report’s themes chime with the action already being taken as part of the government’s reform programme”.^[18] It argued that the changes proposed in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill “will give us more powers to regulate the broken care market”. It also pointed to the introduction of regional care cooperatives, which it said would enable local authorities to “better plan, forecast and commission places and negotiate with private providers, ensuring they can provide the placements children need at a sustainable cost to taxpayers”.^[19] The government has also pointed at measures in the bill which seek to improve support available for kinship and foster care, support care leavers and improve child protection and the data underpinning it.^[20]

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