Official Statistics

Children's public health nursing, 2025: methodology

Updated 17 September 2026

Applies to England

Overview

These official statistics in development cover the children’s public health nursing workforce and national delivery of the healthy child programme in 2025.

The data is based on returns from 145 local councils in England.

Six local councils did not submit a return. The report includes local council, regional and England-level summaries for:

• health visitor workforce
• school nursing workforce
• service activity

Data source

Data was collected using a Microsoft Excel tool sent to every local council in England. The tool contained:

• validated quantitative data tables
• yes or no lists
• a small number of narrative fields

Each area used its most recent available workforce data from a date between September and December 2025. Due to local reporting variation, the date was not the same in every area.

Service activity data was submitted for the period 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025 using data from quarter 4 of the 2024 to 2025 financial year and quarters 1 to 3 of the 2025 to 2026 financial year.

It is important to note that these statistics are not directly comparable with the following publications:

• Health visitor service delivery data, which provides quarterly data through an interim reporting system. Data is submitted by local councils on a voluntary basis
• NHS workforce statistics, which provides NHS workforce statistics covering NHS providers only. About three-quarters of local councils commission from NHS providers but others use charities or private provision, or deliver services themselves. The NHS workforce statistics therefore show a lower number than the figures published in this report

Data processing 

Data was extracted directly from the submitted return using a reproducible process written in R. Data was checked for completeness, expected structure and duplicate records. String cleaning was applied to ensure consistent local council identifiers.

Blank, non-numeric or invalid entries were treated as missing values and excluded from calculations where appropriate. 

Workforce measures 

Health visiting and school nursing workforce figures are presented as total established whole-time equivalent (WTE). Whole-time equivalent is a measure of staffing that converts both full-time and part-time staff hours into the equivalent number of full-time posts.

Workforce categories in the publication were based on the role groupings used in the data return. These reflect service structures and were tested with local authorities to make sure they were clear. They group roles with similar professional registration or function. Where a category contains several job roles, we add their WTE values to produce one figure.

The specific job roles included within each broader workforce category vary between the health visiting and school nursing sections, reflecting the different workforce structures captured in the data return. WTE values are therefore combined within each publication section separately, rather than across health visiting and school nursing workforces.

Regional and England workforce totals are calculated by summing local council WTE values. 

Service activity measures 

Service activity includes statutory and non-statutory healthy child programme reviews. Statistics for statutory reviews are presented within the commentary. There are no statistics presented for the other reviews as not all areas provide them. Raw data is available within the published data tables.

For each review type, such as antenatal reviews, we combine activity counts from each local council return before calculating percentages.

Where publication categories represent multiple staff groups, these are combined before aggregation. The tables below show how roles are grouped into broader categories for the health visiting and school nursing workforces.

Health visiting

Published workforce category	Job roles included
Specialist community public health nurse (SCPHN)	Health visitor (SCPHN), specialist health visitor (SCPHN), team leader with caseload
Other registered	Staff nurse, trainee nurse associate, nurse associate, Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) practitioner, including supervisor and family nurse
Other clinical	Other (clinical)
Non-registered	Nursery nurse, health visitor assistant, family support worker
Other support	Other (non-clinical support roles)
Management	Service manager, FNP quality support officer, team leader without caseload, head of nursing for health visiting
Administration	Health visiting administrator or clerical
Other management and administration	Other (management and admin)

School nursing

Published workforce category	Job roles included
SCPHN	School nurse (SCPHN), specialist school nurse, team leader (with caseload)
Other registered	School nurse (non-SCPHN), school staff nurse, nurse associate, trainee nurse associate
Other clinical	Other (clinical)
Non-registered	Support worker or assistant, school nurse assistant
Other support	Other (non-clinical support roles)
Management	Service manager, team leader without caseload, head of nursing for school nursing
Administration	School nursing administrator or clerical
Other management and administration	Other (management and admin)

Percentage calculations 

All percentages published at local council, regional and national level are calculated from aggregated counts rather than by averaging or summing local authority percentages. 

For each indicator, the numerator and denominator are aggregated separately before the percentage is calculated. Examples include the percentage of referrals offered a review and the percentage that completed a review.

For regional and England summaries, the numerator and denominator are first summed across all contributing local councils before the percentage is calculated. This ensures that larger local councils contribute proportionately to regional and national estimates and is consistent with Government Statistical Service (GSS) good statistical practice. 

Geographical aggregation 

Publication outputs are produced for: 

• England
• Office for National Statistics (ONS) 1TL regions
• local councils

Regional and England values are derived by aggregating local council counts and recalculating percentages from these aggregated totals. National and regional percentages are therefore not equal to the average or sum of local council percentages. 

Rounding 

Published numeric values and percentages are rounded to nearest whole numbers.

Data quality and correction factor

Percentages relating to delivery settings may not add up to 100% because councils may overcount reviews, particularly remote contacts. This can happen when councils report totals and component breakdowns that do not match. In these cases, we use each local council’s reported total to keep the figures consistent.

We used a population-based scaling factor to estimate national figures. This accounted for the 6 local councils that did not submit workforce data. We divided England’s population aged 0 to 5 (3,072,243) by the population covered by responding councils (2,956,757) using the most up to date Office for National Statistics population data for the year 2025 accessed through the Nomis platform. This produced a correction factor of 1.0391.

National estimates for the total workforce for health visitors and school nurses were produced by multiplying the observed totals from responding local councils by this factor. This assumes the relationship between workforce numbers and the population aged 0 to 5 is similar in responding and non-responding local councils.

Reproducibility 

All data processing, aggregation and publication tables are generated using a fully reproducible R workflow. This approach ensures that outputs can be regenerated consistently from the submitted data returns while applying the same cleaning, aggregation and calculation rules to all local councils.