Southampton is now ranked the 76th most deprived local authority area in England.
This marked an improvement six years on from when the city ranked 55th worst in the country in the official national measure of relative deprivation.
Members of Southampton City Council’s children and families scrutiny panel were told it was not an entirely positive picture.
A report to the panel on Thursday, June 4, said initial analysis showed the overall change had been driven by “substantial improvements” in the areas of living environment and barriers to housing and services.
However, Southampton’s ranking had dropped in the areas of health and disability, education, skills and training, employment, and income.
Laura Trevett, service manager for performance and compliance, told councillors these were areas that really mattered for children and families.
Portsmouth is ranked as being a marginally more deprived area than Southampton.
The panel heard the council changed statistical neighbour cohort last year.
This group features ten similar local authorities to Southampton.
Ms Trevett said: “We still have Portsmouth in our cohort, which are a very close neighbour for us and are similar to us in terms of the makeup of children in the journey, where they are, looked after children, those sorts of things.
“It’s just to always hold in mind that it’s not a perfect comparison to behold but we generally use it because it’s helpful for benchmarking.
“Southampton is a very unique place I would say.”
The senior officer told councillors the local authority had been on a journey over the past five years which had seen the number of children in its care and the number of child protection plans come down “quite significantly”.
She said an area where further progress was wanted was on the number of children subject to child protection plans.
Ms Trevett said: “There’s a lot of work around that, but I was also here when it was 500, so I felt fairly happy with under 300 although it would be good to see those come down.
“Not because we don’t want to hold children to our protection plans, but if you’re on a child protection plan it means that child is at risk of significant harm and we want children to be safe and thriving.”