Prioritising vulnerable children and families for action and support - Anne Longfield
“A year ago, schools were still in lockdown for most children, the second time in twelve months that children had been asked to stay at home, learn online and not see their friends. While it seems we are now heading out of the pandemic, for many children the impact of Covid and the lockdowns that went with it, will be long-lasting.
There is no doubt that many children have found the last two years extremely tough. We know from recent surveys and research how lockdown had a negative impact on some children’s mental health and educational attainment. For thousands of vulnerable children though, lockdown was particularly horrendous. Even before Covid, there were hundreds of thousands of children in England growing up surrounded by addiction issues, domestic violence, serious parental mental ill health, or poverty. For many, Covid rocket-boosted these existing problems. For others, Covid brought them on.
Sadly, these are the families who are so frequently invisible and go unsupported, and these are the children most likely to fall through gaps in the education or care systems. Often, they are the children who can end up in harms’ way - exploited by ruthless organised criminals into county lines or by the abusers who have such a talent for spotting the most vulnerable teenagers.
Over the last few months, I have heard from teachers, social workers, youth workers, those working in children’s services, the police, and children and parents themselves about how the pandemic has seen many vulnerable children go off the radar and how it is has opened-up many new opportunities for those who exploit and abuse children to succeed. In fact, I can’t think of a single professional I have spoken to who hasn’t said Covid made existing problems worse for many of those children most at risk.
As Children’s Commissioner for England, I published research in 2019 which found around 2.3 million children were growing up in families where a parent had addiction, severe mental health conditions, or there was domestic violence. This included around 100,000 children where domestic abuse, parental drug and alcohol dependency and severe mental health problems were all present. Before the pandemic, around 50,000 children were taken into care because of abuse or neglect at home and across a typical class of 30, six children are growing up at risk due to family circumstances.
At the same time, there are huge long-standing problems with a care system creaking at the seams, with unacceptable rates of school exclusion, with the growth in child poverty, and a children’s mental health service that is frequently not meeting the needs of those who need support or treatment.
The recent murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson have also revealed long-standing systemic safeguarding failures and children’s services departments which are not able to prevent appalling abuse from happening.
Since March 2020, the Covid crisis has accelerated many of the factors that can make children particularly vulnerable. It is revealing that 65% of organisations have reported an increase in the numbers of children and families requesting their services because of domestic violence between parents, and that 57% have reported a “large” increase in the number of children and families requesting their services due to serious parental mental health problems. 50% have reported that of the families and children already receiving support from their organisations, there had been an increase in the severity of problems associated with parental addiction.
The House of Lords Public Services Committee also concluded in a recent report that the number of vulnerable children “invisible” to services was likely to have increased during the pandemic, partly because many referrals come from teachers and that there has been a reduced visibility of vulnerable children during school lockdowns.
That reduced visibility was revealed in the most recent referral statistics published by the Department for Education last November showing a fall in the number of children being referred to social services during the Covid pandemic lockdown. The figures show there was a 31% drop in referrals via schools during that period, demonstrating how some vulnerable children did drop out of the sight of the teachers who are often the first to spot the need for children's social services to assess a child.
The most recent data shows that nearly 13,000 children assessed by children's social services in England between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021 were deemed to be at risk due to gang involvement and that almost 17,000 children were assessed where child sexual exploitation was a factor. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg, particularly when you consider the drop in referrals to social services via schools.
Schools did stay open for some vulnerable children during lockdown, but the vast majority did not attend. At the same time, the nature of lockdown prevented many families from receiving the kind of face-to-face services that can help prevent serious problems turning into crisis. Many grassroots organisations who I have spoken to have talked about how vulnerable families felt some services weren’t there for them during the Covid crisis – often at a time when the family was struggling financially too. This has left some feeling even more distrustful of local service providers, including statutory services.
It is these children and families that the Commission on Young Lives is focusing on – the increasing number of teenagers experiencing a conveyor belt of familial vulnerability, conflict, exclusion, exploitation, care and custody. I set up this Commission because the response to helping these children avoid this fate is so often inadequate. We are poor on identification and data sharing, poor on communication, and uncoordinated.
Many of these challenges are generational. They will require deep-rooted reform of the care sector, a well-funded early years’ offer that provides support to vulnerable families, a children’s mental health service that is not a postcode lottery and which spots and treats problems much earlier.
It will require an education system that is inclusive, which meets the needs of children with SEN, and which does not shrug as vulnerable children are excluded or dumped into poor Alternative Provision.
It will mean targets for cutting child poverty, and no longer accepting that thousands of children leave school with no qualifications or prospects.
Ultimately though, it will mean changing the way Government and society views vulnerable children and families, so they become a priority for action and support, not an afterthought or a statistic.”
This blog accompanies a series of policy briefings produced by the AYJ as part of the UKRI-funded Impact of COVID-19 on Youth Justice project, delivered in partnership between the AYJ and the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.
AYJ would like to thank Anne Longfield and the Commission on Young Lives for their valuable contribution. Find out more about the Commission:
Website: thecommissiononyounglives.co.uk
Twitter: @coyl2022
AYJ response: AYJ submits evidence to the Commission on Young Lives