Guidance

Children in need census 2022 to 2023: specification

Specification and validation rules for local authorities and software suppliers preparing for the 2022 to 2023 children in need census.

• From: Department for Education
• Published: 13 October 2021
• Last updated: 25 October 2022 — See all updates

Applies to England

Documents

Children in need census 2022 to 2023: business and technical specification

PDF, 444 KB, 34 pages

Children in need census 2022 to 2023: validation rules

ODS, 17.7 KB

This file is in an OpenDocument format

Children in need census 2022 to 2023: validation rules

MS Excel Spreadsheet, 23.8 KB

Details

This is technical information about submitting data for the children in need census for the period 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023.

It is for:

• suppliers of software for local authority management information systems (MIS)
• users of local authority MIS software

It explains:

• changes to the previous year’s census collection
• what data local authorities should supply at child level
• how to structure the data in XML
• how to check the data against the validation rules

Published 13 October 2021
Last updated 25 October 2022 + show all updates

1. 25 October 2022

   The validation rules files have been replaced with updated versions. Changes are described in the version history in the documents.

2. 13 October 2021

   First published.