During January we were pleased to produce the latest findings from two independent analyses which we produce every year.

The first is the Looked After Children Services stress test. This uses publicly available data to examine recent trends in the numbers, rates and spend on looked after children (LAC) in England. A flavour of findings includes:

• Total spending by local authorities on LAC services has increased by 71% since 2012, from £3.083bn to £5.278bn in 2020.
• Over this period, spending on LAC also absorbed an increasing proportion of total spend on children’s services, from 36% in 2012 to 50% in 2020.
• The number of LAC being placed more than 20 miles away and outside the local authority boundary has increased from 8,000 in 2012 to 12,520 in 2020, an increase of 56.5%.

The second is the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) stress test in England. It presents a national picture and then examines how these trends vary by local area. Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are often experiencing different pressures to the national average: we aggregate 13 indicators to identify those which we think are experiencing the most pressures. A flavour of findings includes:

• The number of open referrals in children and young people mental health services at the end of each November has seen a major increase of 126% over the past five years, from 152,011 open referrals at the end of November 2016 to 344,178 in November 2020.
• The planned spend for CCGs on children and young people mental health services has increased from £614m for 2017/18 to £872m for 2020/21. This is an increase of 42%.

As well as the stress tests, the Pulse contains a wide range of other research and policy. Click on the link below to download your copy.