FOI reference: FOI-2026-3799
You asked
Could the FOI team kindly provide aggregate counts from the linked data used for the ONS publication The education background of looked-after children who interact with the criminal justice system, published on 5 December 2022.
Please use the same study population, definition of looked-after children and criminal justice observation period as that publication, i.e., people born between 1 September 1993 and 31 August 1994 who attended school in England.
For the care-experienced group only, please provide a single table showing, for each combination of the following three characteristics:
1. Recorded sex, using the categories underlying Table 12a.
2. Highest recorded SEN provision, using the categories underlying Table 4a.
3. Whether the person was ever permanently excluded from school, using the definition underlying Table 11.
For each combination, please provide:
1. The total number of distinct people in that group, including those without any recorded criminal justice outcome.
2. The number of those people recorded as having received at least one immediate custodial sentence during the publication's observation period, ending in 2017.
Characteristics must be broken down jointly. E.g., One row would show males with a recorded SEN statement who'd been permanently excluded, alongside the total number in that group and the number who received an immediate custodial sentence. Separate tables for each characteristic would not provide the information requested.
Please retain missing or unknown values as separate categories where possible, and supply any definitions or explanatory notes needed to interpret the figures.
CSV, Excel or Google Sheets format would be preferred. I am requesting aggregate information only, and am happy to receive appropriately rounded or suppressed figures. Please distinguish suppressed or unavailable values from genuine zeroes and explain the disclosure rules applied.
This request is for recorded information, whether held in existing tables or retrievable through a database query. I am not requesting a new statistical model, a causal assessment or any individual-level records.
If the full request exceeds cost limit, pls provide any separable information that can be supplied within the limit and advise how the request could be narrowed. For reference, my priority is the joint sex-by-SEN breakdown, with permanent exclusion omitted if necessary.
If ONS no longer holds the relevant records or tables, please identify the likely data holder if known.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Unfortunately, we do not hold the requested information in a recorded form. To fulfil this request, we would need to create new information, which we are not obliged to do under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). Creating this information would require complex analysis, involving extensive work and we are unfortunately not in a position to offer this as a bespoke output.
If you wish to conduct the analysis yourself, the following information may be helpful.
Two data sources were used to create the analysis The education background of looked-after children who interact with the criminal justice system. The first is available to download from Section 6 of the publication. The second was an extract created by the Department for Education (DfE) specifically for use in this approved research project and provided to the ONS on behalf of DfE and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to use in the ONS's Secure Research Service (SRS). The SRS is a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and provides accredited or approved researchers with secure access to de-identified, unpublished data to deliver research for the public good. The SRS team do not conduct analysis on behalf of users. They provide a service allowing accredited researchers to conduct analysis themselves.
If you wish to gain access to the datasets to conduct the analysis yourself, DfE and MoJ are responsible for reviewing project applications and, if approved, provide access to a bespoke extract of the data via the SRS. For more details, please go to Ministry of Justice: Data First on GOV.UK.