Among homeless families the council houses in temporary accommodation, this is the average number of children per family. It is not a performance score — it describes who is affected: a higher number means larger families, who are harder to place because big enough homes are scarce and more children have their schooling and friendships disrupted. It mainly helps compare councils fairly, since a council housing lots of large families faces a tougher job.
| name | children_per_ta_family |
|---|---|
| dataset | 06-hclic-temporary-accommodation |
| kind | constructed |
| type | ratio |
| unit | children per household |
| grain | local authority (England) |
| role | stratifier |
| source | ta_children_total ÷ ta_households_with_children (TA1 cols 6 and 5) |
| period | Quarter-end snapshot, 31 March 2026 (Q4 FY2025-26); quarterly series from 2018 Q2; same columns in 202512_revised and 2024-25 annual files |
| missingness | Inherited from inputs: exclude England/region rows; treat suppressed/imputed values as missing, not zero; use the same LA code vintage on both sides of any cross-dataset join (reorganised councils change codes); inputs carry the H-CLIC rounding/imputation caveats |
| score_note | Pure demographic stratifier for context, no efficiency content. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Average number of children per family in TA — a demographic descriptor of the caseload rather than a performance measure. Useful for contextualising costs (larger families need larger, scarcer placements). Ratio of two rounded counts, so noisy where family caseloads are small.