Association between health indicators of maternal adversity and the rate of infant entry to local authority care in England: a longitudinal ecological study.

Objective: Infants enter care at varying rates across local authorities (LAs) in England, but evidence is lacking on what is driving these differences. With this ecological study, we aimed to explore the extent to which adversity indicated within women's hospitalisation histories, predelivery, explained the rate of infant entry into care.

Methods: We used two longitudinal person-level data sets on hospitalisations and entries to care to create annual measures for 131 English LAs, between 2006/2007 and 2013/2014 (April-March).

Data Resource: the National Pupil Database (NPD).

Introduction: The National Pupil Database (NPD) is a record-level administrative data resource curated by the UK government's Department for Education that is used for funding purposes, school performance tables, policy making, and research.

Processes: Data are sourced from schools, exam awarding bodies, and local authorities who collect data on an on-going basis and submit to the Department for Education either termly or yearly.

Data Contents: NPD contains child-level and school-level data on all pupils in state schools in England (6.