FOI Request - Children's Social Care Services

Request 101003930726

1. The total number of child relinquishment requests per year for each of the last ten years.
For the avoidance of doubt, this refers to instances where birth or adoptive parents contacted the local authority requesting that Children’s Social Care Services assume care responsibility for a child.

2.The number of referrals received by Children’s Social Care Services where domestic abuse was recorded as a factor;
a) 2023
b) 2024
c) 2025, if available
d) If 2025 figures are incomplete, please provide whatever data is currently available and specify the date range that the data covers.

3. For each of the last five years, please provide either:
a) The annual staff (or ideally just social worker, if these figure exist) sickness or absence rate already held by the authority (for example, percentage of working time lost), or
b) If no such percentage is routinely recorded, the total number of working days lost to sickness/absence and the total number of contracted working days for Children’s Social Care Services staff in each year.

Please provide whichever of the above is held in recorded form.

4. The average caseload, and the average number of children (if different) held by qualified social care workers in:
a) Frontline child protection assessment teams
b) Safeguarding teams for each of the last five years

Response 27-02-2026

1. Information not held in an easily accessible manner, so each case would need to be checked individually in order to find the information requested. At thousands of cases for the time period requested this is estimated to take over 40 hours, and that would cost the Council in excess of £600. In accordance with section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, excessive cost, we are therefore unable to comply with this part of your request.  

2. 

3. The figures below are based on the absence stats for the full Children’s Service – we do not have a breakdown available on job titles

2020-2021 3.57%
2021-2022 6%
2022-2023 5.21%
2023-2024 7.31%
2024-2025 7%

4.a) To find the information requested is estimated to take over 40 hours, and that would cost the Council in excess of £600. In accordance with section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, excessive cost, we are therefore unable to comply with this part of your request.  

b) We have 6 active teams with safeguarding roles:

Area Team - E
Area Team - W
Disability Team
Throughcare
Youth Justice
Access Team

To ensure that we are representing the LA accurately in respect of average annual caseloads, we would need to examine the following per team:

-             12 monthly case load reports per year, per team (12 x 5 = 60 x 6 = 360 monthly reports)
-             Each monthly report will need to be checked for errors and duplication
-             Duty systems need to be taken into consideration (long term duty constituting a case load figure)
-             Staffing levels in each team would also need to be checked for impact across the year

As this information is not currently held in this manner, this would need to be done manually. It is estimated that each team would require at least 7 hours of research and validation of findings and therefore the exercise would be in excess of the 40 hours allowed - information therefore exempt under Section 12 FOISA.2002.