Minister O’Gorman publishes 2023 State of the Nation’s Children report

The annual report provides a comprehensive picture of children’s lives in Ireland and is a resource for policy makers, researchers and civil society

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman has today published the 2023 edition of the State of the Nation's Children (SONC) report.

The report provides a comprehensive picture of our children's lives by presenting key information on children’s health, behavioural and educational outcomes as well as their relationships with their parents and their friends. It also presents data on supports and services available to children.

SONC provides the most up-to-date data on the National Set of Child Wellbeing indicators, and:

• charts the wellbeing of children in Ireland

• tracks changes over time

• benchmarks progress in Ireland relative to other countries

SONC is widely used as a resource by policy makers, the research community and civil society, and aims to inform Government policy on children, young people and families. The SONC reports are useful for tracking trends in relation to children’s wellbeing, they provide data that shows us where more work needs to be done and presents us with evidence of where progress is being made.

Some of the key findings in the report include:

In 2023, it is estimated that there were 1,255,738 children living in Ireland. This accounted for 23.2% of the total population. Of these, 55,716 were aged less than one year, down from 61,027 in 2022.
For the 2022/23 pre-school year there were 108,616 children registered for the latest finalised ECCE programme call under Core Funding. There were 3,970 services contracted to offer ECCE in 2022/23.
In 2021, 61.7% of infants were breastfed on being discharged from hospital, up slightly from 61.3% in 2020.
In 2022, there were 135,033 hospital discharges of children, up from 119,642 in 2021.
In 2022, 15 year-old children in Ireland achieved a mean score of 516.0 on the OECD-PISA reading literacy scale, making Irish students the best performing in reading literacy among the 37 countries in the OECD and the 26 EU countries.
In 2022, 15 year-old children in Ireland achieved a mean score of 504 on the OECD-PISA science literacy scale, up from 496 in 2018.
In the school year 2021/2022, 40.3% of children in primary school were absent for more than 20 days, up substantially from 11.1% in 2020/2021. Similarly, 26.8% of students in post primary school were absent for more than 20 days, up from 12.0% in 2020/2021.
In 2022 Q4, there were 21,473 child welfare and protection referrals to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, up from 19,580 in 2021.
In 2021, there were 141 births to mothers aged 15–17, down from 181 in 2020.
In 2021, there were 9 suicides by children aged 10–17, down from 13 in 2020.
In 2022, 15.2% of children were considered to be at risk of poverty, up from 13.6% in 2021, while 7.5% of children experienced consistent poverty, up from 5.2% in 2021.
In 2022, there were 5,626 children in the care of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency down from 5,777 in 2021.

Note for editors:

This report has been published biennially since 2006 and annually since 2020, and is prepared by the Data and Analytics Unit in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

Since 2020, DCEDIY has transformed and modernised the delivery of the report by moving to a web version, with links provided to the underlying data tables, in the CSO’s PxStat. This new format has many benefits for users, including that users always have access to the most up to date version of the data and have access to previous data and additional analysis of the data not reported on in the report. In line with the Government’s Open Data Initiative the data is available in an open, machine-readable format.