ABSTRACT
Once again there was a marked absence of any striking relationship between numbers in care and any one index of social conditions producing need. Taking the statistical evidence at its face value, it might therefore have been concluded that needs and numbers were in no way related; that the proportion of children in care in any local authority depended on factors other than the amount of need in that area. But the obvious difficulties of defining ‘need’ and of subjecting it to accurate measurement suggested that this viewpoint ought to be treated with caution. Indices of social conditions, though the only measurable way of approaching the concept of need, are nevertheless only approximate criteria and some of them are more crude and inadequate than others. If some factors which influence child care need can only be measured in an approximate way by means of the published statistics, there are others which cannot be calculated in this way at all.
