Children’s institutions

The statistics include all institutions qualified by the Directorate. Familiy support centres are also included, as well as care centres for minors. Municipal institutions, except in Oslo (and, until July 1. 2008, Trondheim), are not included.

Ideal institutions and other private institutions Ideal institutions are owned by organisations with an exclusively ideal purpose, and all profits are transferred back to this purpose.

Type of stay Acute stays are stays according to the Act relating to child welfare services section 4-6, 1. paragraph, section 4-6, 2. paragraph and 4-25.

Behavioural stays are stays according to sections 4-24 and 4-26.

Voluntary stays are stays according to sections 4-4, 2. paragraph and 5. paragraph.

Care stays are stays according to other sections of the Act, mainly section 4-12 and 4-8. Also including section 5A-1 (stay in a care center for minors). From 2015 section 5A-1 stay in care center for minors is separated from other care stays in a own category. 

Education

Health care education is a selection of education codes from Statistics Norway's Standard for Classification of Educations. In addition, the Register of Education for Health Care Personnel requiring authorization, administered by the Directorate of Health is used to define health care educations. For those employed in the health care industry without a health care education, information about their education is collected from BU (“Befolkningens udanningsnivå”).

Contracted man-years deducted long absences

The contracted man-years are the sum of all part- and full time jobs, subtracting doctor certified absence and maternity leave. Information about sickness absence certified by a doctor is collected from the National Insurance Administration's Register of sickness absence. The percentages of sickness absence for the fourth quarter of every year are used in the adjustment of the contracted man-years.

Standard Industrial Classification, 87.901 Child welfare institutions. Region is defined according to the Directorate.

Name: Children’s institutions
Topic: Social conditions, welfare and crime

Division for Health, care and social statistics

6 regions: North, Middle Norway, South, West, East, Oslo.

From July 2008 Trondheim is part of Region Middle Norway. In the statistics for 2008, in the tables that are based on registrations throughout the year, Trondheim is singled out as a separate entity.

The statistics are produced on a yearly basis and published in the third quarter after the year of registration.

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A working group appointed by the Ministry of children and equality recommended in 2006 that official statistics on institutions were to be reintroduced. Such statistics existed from 1989 to 2001, after that only as summary statistics. The first statistics in the new series (for the year 2007) were published in May 2009. The new statistics consist of financial statements and data on personnel and services, and give a complete picture of the children’s institutions.

From 2008 care centres for minors were made the responsibility of the child welfare authorities. These centres are included in the statistics from 2008.

The primary users of the statistics are public institutions, the public, the press and the institutions themselves. The statistics may be used to illustrate differences in the management of institutions and differences in the use of resources between regions and over time.

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Data for the public institutions correspond with data on children’s institutions in StatRes 2004-2012 (government resource use and outcomes). One difference is that StatRes data include the purchase of beds from private institutions.

The new statistics (from 2007) are not comparable to the institutions statistics that existed in the period 1989-2001. The previous statistics were based on a form collected from every single institution.

Data on services in institutions (from the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs) as well as the financial statements from private institutions are collected according to the Act concerning official statistics and Statistics Norway, section 2-2.

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The statistics comprise all children’s institutions qualified by the Directorate, as well as Familiy support centres. Municipal institutions (except in Oslo and, until July 1. 2008, Trondheim) are not included. Data are given per institution (organisational number), except in the case of the financial statements of the state owned institutions.

At the end of 2007, care centres for unaccompanied juvenile asylum seekers were made the responsibility of the child welfare authorities. These centres are included in the statistics from 2008.

Data on services: From 2014 BiRK replaced the ODA-database in the Directorate is the source of all data on services. For Oslo (and, until July 1. 2008, Trondheim), the corresponding data had to be collected separately from the two municipalities. Data are registered for each individual, then aggregated and sent to Statistics Norway (SN).

Data on personnel: The register based employment statistics was until the end of 2014 built on various public registers, the most important was the The Register of Employers and Employees, (the Ee-register) produced by The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organization (NAV). From 2015 onwards a new joint reporting solution called “a-ordningen”, gathers the reporting from the employers to the Ee-register, reporting of earnings and personnel data to the Tax Administration and reporting to Statistics Norway, in a common system. In addition to “a-ordningen” other registers provide additional information. These registers are being used to assure the quality of the data, to consolidate the consistency between different data sources and to classify people as employed. The figures for 2015 and onwards are therefore not comparable with the figures for previous years. For more information, see the article linked to the 2015-figures: http://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/regsys/aar/2016-05-27

The method to compute working hours is changed since 2018. This has caused a break in the time-series for contractual man-years adjusted for long-term leaves. It is, however, important to emphasize that the reported contractual percentage of full-time equivalent is used to compute working hours for most employments. For this employment group, the working hours are computed in the same way as before. Most of those whose working hours are computed using the new method, are hourly-paid. Among the children’s institutions, most workers are under permanent fixed-salary contract.  Combined, this suggests that the change in method has not caused a large break in the time-series.      

Read more about the change (only available in Norwegian): https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/artikler-og-publikasjoner/ny-metode-gir-bedre-informasjon-om-arbeidstid

Data on financial statements: Regarding state institutions and municipal institutions in Oslo (and, until July 1. 2008, Trondheim), the data are extracted from state and municipal financial statements. For all private institutions the corresponding data had to be collected directly from the institutions.

The data are based on complete registrations.

The different parts of the data set have been controlled separately, and the consistency between them has been checked. The Directorate and SN have established a common list of institutions based on organisational number.

For institutions serving several regions or offering additional services, data have been adjusted by SN. 

Until 2008 data per institution on financial statements and man-years is corrected by using financial statement information. The correction is to make the numbers on the child's home region. That is for institutions that are present in several regions, or also have other type of business (like foster care). From 2009 a new method for calculating man-years on the child's home region was implemented. The number of bed-days the region has bought from an institution is used for a corresponding calculation. 

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As the statistics are published at an aggregated level, there is no identification of individuals or institutions.

Most of the statistics are presented according to the child’s home region, and not the region where the institution is situated. Therefore, one can compare the different regions’ use of institutional services, irrespective of the region where that service is actually carried out.

Because care centres for minors are included in the data from 2008, data are not fully comparable with 2007.

Private children’s institutions offering additional services or operating in several regions are asked to estimate the scope of such activities and to describe the method used. SN then compares the estimated data with data on services reported from the same institutions. In general the reported data are accepted.

Administrative expenditure and man-years are treated somewhat differently in private and public institutions. This means that the data by ownership are not fully comparable.

The consistency between data on financial statements, services and man-years is tested according to the institution’s organisational number. Major inconsistencies can be discovered by such tests, but mostly correctness and consistencies must be presumed.

Since data for 2007 and 2008 were published, some new information was received. Therefore, some revised data for 2007 and 2008 have been published.

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