The 31st edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT® Data Book describes how children across the United States were faring before the coronavirus pandemic began. As always, policymakers, researchers and advocates can continue using this information to help shape their work and build a stronger future for children, families and communities.

This comment piece by Charles H Zeanah and Kathryn L Humphreys accompanies a study on the number of children in institutional care around the globe, entitled 'Prevalence and number of children living in institutional care: global, regional, and country estimates,' published in the Lancet in March 2020.

The aim of this study was to estimate global-level, regional-level, and country-level numbers and percentages of children living in institutional care.

In this paper, the authors examine how standardized tools, in this case, a standardized parenting programme and a standardized Norwegian assessment tool, influence professional roles as experienced by child welfare workers (CWS professionals) in Norway.

This paper explores the potential of data linkage to contribute to understanding interactions between care proceedings and care demand, the examination of changes in practice through the analysis of cohorts of children in the care system, or receiving services, and the provision of feedback to those working in the family justice system on the outcomes of care proceedings for children in the UK.

The Outcomes for children before and after care proceedings reform study linked administrative records with a research database of care proceedings to examine children's care and service journeys associated with care proceedings in England and Wales.

The purpose of this manual is to provide guidance on how to collect and report data on children in formal alternative care in a standardised way, and to analyse, present, and make the data available for use.

This study examined the outcomes of a training aimed at enhancing child welfare practitioners’ use of data from the the Ontario Looking After Children (OnLAC) project for service planning related to young people’s educational outcomes.

This report presents demographic characteristics, health service access and use, and timing of key fertility-related milestones among adults aged 18–44 who had ever been in foster care as compared with those who had never been in foster care in the United States.

This annual publication presents information on those who left care during the previous financial year, as well as the circumstances of those who have left care at the time of their nineteenth birthday.