The SFR has been published recently. In many ways it exhibits the same trends.
Of the 69,540 children looked after 41,410 are 10 and over. Only 28,140 are under 10. 19,850 are in looked after voluntarily (S20) and the rest in some form of compulsory care. 5,330 were adopted from care. 4,280 were under 5. The number of children in care under 5 is 13,820. Hence if you look at the proportion of children adopted from care as the ratio of the number under 5 compared to the number adopted the figure (expressed as a percentage) is 30.6 (it is not a proper percentage because of the failure of dimensional analysis).
There is a jump in the number of East Europeans looked after with "white other" going up from 2210 to 2550 and Gypsy/Roma going from 220 to 250.
I expect to get my analyses that look in more detail at what is happening with children under 5 later this year or early next year, but the system is clearly still going wrong in a big way.
Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin...
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