The "pressure cooker" challenges faced by the child social care system before the pandemic contributed to a rise in killed children during lockdown, the Mirror has been told.
Between April 2020 and March 2021 - when Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson, Dylan Freeman, and siblings Pavinya and Nigish Nithiyakumar died - there were 536 serious incident notifications in England, government statistics show.
This is an unsettling increase of 19 per cent compared to the same time period in the previous year.