CLA Technical Information & Glossary of Terms

The Children Looked after area of Nova reporting introduces new concepts and data-sets that may be unfamiliar to attainment analysts, but also brings that reporting to an audience previously unfamiliar with the reporting suite. This section is intended to clarify some of those unfamiliar elements.

Data Fields

The DfE have supplied us with the following CLA-specific fields from the SSDA903 collection that
Nova is utilising in its CLA analysis:

• AGE_POC_START: The age of the child at the start of their latest period of care
• PL_CLOUNT: The number of placements a child had in their latest period of care
• POC_DUR: The duration of a child's period of care in days
• POC_COUNT: The number of periods of care a child has had. This will be the number of times a child has entered care in their care history
• SDQ_YEAR: The year that the child's SDQ score corresponds with
• SDQ_SCORE: The Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) score held for the child
• SDQ_REASON: The reason for not submitting an SDQ score where one was required
• CLA_12_MONTHS: A flag for whether the child was looked after continuously for 12 months.

Domains

In many reports the cohort of all pupils is split into various domains. A domain is a subset of pupils within the whole and a single pupil can exist in several of those domains at the same time. The list below describes the definition of those domains:

• National (all schools): The entire reportable national cohort of children, including those from independent and state-funded schools
• National (state-funded schools): The national cohort of children educated in state-funded schools. Excludes pupils in independent schools
• National (CLA): The national cohort of children looked after, including those attending independent as well as state-funded schools
• LA (all schools): The entire cohort of children educated in all schools physically located within the local authority (independent or state-funded)
• LA (state-funded schools): The cohort of children educated in state-funded schools physically located within the local authority
• Virtual School: The cohort of Children Looked After included in the SSDA903 return submitted by the active user's local authority. This includes children educated in schools outside of the local authority but for whom the virtual school is responsible

State-Funded & Mainstream Schools

The definition of a state-funded school and a mainstream follows the DfE's NPD definitions and includes the following school types:

• Academy - Sponsor Led (Mainstream: Yes)
• Community School (Mainstream: Yes)
• Voluntary Aided School (Mainstream: Yes)
• Voluntary Controlled School (Mainstream: Yes)
• Foundation School (Mainstream: Yes)
• City Technology College (Mainstream: Yes)
• Community Special School
• Foundation Special School
• Academy - Special School
• Academy - Converter (Mainstream: Yes)
• Free School - Mainstream (Mainstream: Yes)
• Special Free School
• Converter Special Academy
• Free School - UTC (Mainstream: Yes)
• Free School - Studio School (Mainstream: Yes)
• Academy 16-19 Converter

Any schools outside of those in this list are considered 'Other School' types.

SDQ Reason Codes

Where a Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire cannot be completed for a child, a code can be used to describe the reason for this. The list below defines these codes:

• SDQ1: No form returned as child was aged under 4 or over 17 at date of latest assessment
• SDQ2: Carer refused to complete and return the questionnaire
• SDQ3: Not possible to complete the questionnaire due to severity of the child's disabilities
• SDQ4: Other
• SDQ5: Child or young person refuses to allow an SDQ to be completed

More information can be found at gov.uk.

Suppression and Rounding

Due to the sensitive nature of children looked after data, we've implemented protection measures into our analysis that both suppress and round values to prevent the identification of individuals which would otherwise potentially be possible by applying multiple filters.

Note that suppression and rounding only apply to National CLA cohorts and their sub-aggregates. The Virtual School cohort and state-funded cohorts are neither suppressed nor rounded. 

• All count values are rounded to the nearest 10
• Unrounded count values of 5 or less are replaced with an ‘x’
• Calculated values (such as percentages and averages) with a numerator of 5 or less or a denominator of 10 or less are replaced by an ‘x’
• Calculated values are not based on rounded numerators and denominators