The Scottish Government on 26th March 2024 published the annual child protection statistics for August 2022 to July 2023.This blog post takes a closer look at Scotland’s Child Protection 2022-2023 Statistics to consider what the statistics and statistical trends might, and might not, tell us about the needs of children in Scotland.

In a CELCIS blog post, Dr Alex McTier, Evidence and Evaluation Specialist at CELCIS, comments that, while waiting for this year’s publication, a key question was whether we would see the historically low number of children on the Child Protection Register reported in the previous year’s figures continue, or whether the more recent figures had increased, potentially in response to the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising cost of living.

The 2022-2023 data shows that there has been a slight increase, from 2,019 children on the Child Protection Register on 31 July 2022 to 2,094 children on 31 July 2023. This suggests that a new trend of around 2,000 children on the Child Protection Register is beginning to be seen, compared to over 2,500 children between 2010 and 2020. Indeed, the most recent Scottish Government’s four-weekly data collection shows that 2,004 children were on the Child Protection Register on 7 February 2024.