A \u201cnational emergency\u201d of childhood has been declared by the children\u2019s commissioner for England after the most comprehensive data analysis ever conducted of the conditions in which young people are growing up.<\/p>\n
In an interview with The Observer, Rachel de Souza said the lives of too many children were now \u201cDickensian with a modern twist\u201d as young people are exploited to be drug mules and face new dangers in the online world. \u201cI\u2019m calling it a state of emergency because, as children\u2019s commissioner, I cannot sit and do nothing,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking to me that we would allow children to grow up in some of the situations they\u2019re growing up in, and the narrative in Westminster is not about those children.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study, to be published on Monday, found that a third of children are not ready for school at the age of five, more than half of pupils do not achieve a good standard in their English and maths GCSEs at the age of 16, and 12% of young people feel unsafe in their local area. At least 1 million children had active referrals to mental health services last year.<\/p>\n
The children\u2019s commissioner analysed 162 measures of children\u2019s lives, on health, education, criminality, housing and welfare. They included data on everything from access to green spaces to school absences, childhood obesity and encounters with the police.<\/p>\n
Her team used 96 metrics to allocate scores to local authorities and identify the areas of the country where it is hardest to grow up. Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, Hounslow in west London and Bradford in West Yorkshire are the most challenging places to be a child. Cheshire East and Merton, the London borough, and Surrey are the least challenging.<\/p>\n
De Souza says she had found \u201cmassive disparities\u201d around the country. Children in Blackpool, Lancashire, are 27 times more likely to be missing from education than pupils in Lambeth, south London, and 46 times more likely to be excluded than children from Wiltshire.<\/p>\n
The proportion of children who get a good pass (grade 5 or above) in their English and maths GCSEs ranges from 70% in Richmond upon Thames to 31% in Knowsley, near Liverpool.<\/p>\n
Almost a quarter of children in Croydon, south London, feel unsafe, compared with less than 7% of those in Bedford. Young people in Merseyside are at least times 13 times more likely to be stopped and searched than those in areas covered by West Mercia police.<\/p>\n
In Redbridge, north-east London, there are only six outdoor play spaces for every 10,000 young people, compared with 61 for the 7,800 young people in Rutland in the East Midlands. Camden Borough Council in north London invested \u00a3421 in youth services for each teenager, but four local authorities reported zero expenditure: Slough, Herefordshire, and Halton and Warrington, both in Cheshire.<\/p>\n
De Souza says there is a \u201cchildhood lottery\u201d at work but \u201ceven in the best places there are problems\u201d. Leicestershire is in the top 10 least challenging places to grow up, but has the lowest access to mental health support teams of any area.<\/p>\n
Wokingham in Berkshire has low child poverty but also very low spending on youth services. A child in Westminster will be more likely to grow up facing multiple house moves and instability than a child in Hartlepool, County Durham.<\/p>\n
Hampshire performs well overall, but its young people have one of the longest waits for mental health treatment: a median of 118 days from referral to second contact, compared with six in Rutland.<\/p>\n
No area consistently delivers the full range of support that children need to thrive. \u201cTo inoculate children and allow them to have a childhood is increasingly difficult,\u201d says De Souza. \u201cIt is clear that children in every part of the country face deep, unacceptable and avoidable challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poverty is \u201cin this picture but it\u2019s not the whole story\u201d, the children\u2019s commissioner adds. Hounslow has the second lowest score in the data analysis, but Haringey, a north London borough with similar levels of deprivation, has the seventh highest ranking. The children\u2019s commissioner says nursery provision and breakfast clubs were key drivers of its success.<\/p>\n
Scores are highest on average in south-east England but two of the six highest scoring local authorities are in the north.<\/p>\n
De Souza said she had been \u201cutterly disgusted\u201d by some of the things she had heard in her conversations with thousands of children around the country. In Middlesbrough, she met a group of pupils in a high-performing school. \u201cThey talked to me about how they\u2019re learning to play the clarinet. But then they talked about the crackheads who pee on the wall outside, and they said: \u2018We\u2019re scared of going home\u2019 and \u2018It\u2019s not safe to play outside.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cMany had seen knife crime. There were concerns some had seen a murder and watched a body being brought out. It\u2019s totally unacceptable in modern Britain for children to be in places like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The children in the care of the state, where standards should be the most consistent, face some of the biggest variations. Some parts of the country are sending nearly 90% of their children in care to out-of-area placements, compared with less than 20% in other regions. In Tameside, Greater Manchester, half of looked-after children had three or more social workers in a year, while in Hartlepool it was 3%.<\/p>\n
The data comes from the Department for Education and 10 other public bodies. Many of the metrics involve novel analysis and 42 have been newly gathered by the commissioner, using her statutory data powers.<\/p>\n
De Souza warns that the nation seems \u201cblind\u201d to the younger generation and was too quick to stereotype teenagers. \u201cWe\u2019re either hearing that they\u2019re snowflakes who can\u2019t cope, or they\u2019re running around with masks and hoodies on,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t buy into the idea that this is some kind of weak generation. I\u2019m seeing the opposite. I\u2019m seeing kids in the toughest environments really working hard to try to build a life.\u201d<\/p>\n
She calls on the prime minister to create a children\u2019s emergency fund to bring services above a minimum standard in every part of the country. A deputy mayor should be appointed in each area as part of the devolution programme, she adds. \u201cWe need someone responsible for children because it\u2019s too bad,\u201d says the commissioner. \u201cThe hardest places are too hard. It\u2019s not fair for any child, but right across the country, there\u2019s too much disparity. This has to be a line in the sand.\u201d<\/p>\n
The former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, who is preparing to publish his recommendations on how to tackle the crisis of more than 1 million young people who are not in education, employment or training<\/a>, has warned that the UK faces a \u201clost generation\u201d if nothing is done to change the trajectory of children\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n