Local authority statistics
Sunday, November 09, 2003 (23:32:44)

Posted by Sylvia

This table gives the numbers of autistic children known to Social Services in each authority. Specifically, authorities were asked to identify any child known to them as having been diagnosed as autistic by a qualified medical practitioner.

In the CiN census the term "autism" was intended to cover "classical autism" through to "autistic spectrum disorders" which covers a much wider range.

Authorities were asked to include Aspergers syndrome. Note: For CiN purposes, autism was NOT linked to disability, and in fact, out of the estimated 6,400 autistic children in England, or about 5%, were recorded as having autism but not as being disabled.

The reason for including this specific table is the level of public interest in identifying this small but important group of children. The Children in Need survey provides one of the few ways of investigating the demands which such children make on Social services. There are a number of important caveats about these data:

(i) They represent the reporting of cases by authorities, and this may reflect different levels of awareness of autism across the country;

(ii) The figures are not incidence data, and should not be used for that purpose. These figures only include children with autism receiving social services support;

(iii) Reporting of autism appears to vary from authority to authority with some authorities reporting relatively large numbers and others very small numbers, including a significant number of zeros.

The figures confirm that social services support children with autism, even though the figures in the table are likely to under-represent the true position, given the problems associated with the factors mentioned above.

Click here to read more and download the table in Excel format