As Children’s Commissioner, I want every child to have the chance to have a happy, healthy childhood. In speaking to children across the country, I know that where you grow up can have a profound impact on the opportunities young people have, the services they can access, and the challenges they face.
Over the last five and half years, I have spoken with thousands of children. Whether I am visiting a school, care setting, youth organisation, hospital or community group, I hear about the places children call home.
Children are proud of their communities. They talk about the people who matter to them and their future aspirations. But they also talk about the challenges they face – feeling unsafe in parts of the community, their struggles to access the support when they need it and worries about what the future holds.
For too long, these experiences have been seen as isolated challenges. But children’s lives do not work in neat silos. Their health, education, safety, family circumstances and opportunities available to them are all interconnected. Where children grow up shapes every aspect of their lives.
That is why on Monday, I will publish The Childhood Lottery – a landmark dataset bringing together more than 160 measures of children’s lives to build the most comprehensive picture yet of the local factors shaping young lives today.
My findings confirm what children have been saying: the postcode lottery they feel is real.
By bringing together research from my office, alongside data from the Department for Education and 10 other public bodies, The Childhood Lottery looks beyond services or outcomes. It examines the wider picture of what it is like to grow up in different parts of England, revealing how challenges overlap, and are often compounded.
The differences are stark. Growing up in one area can have a huge difference in the chances of feeling safe, accessing support, enjoying opportunities to play or getting the best start in life, compared to other areas.
Some places have a particularly troubling picture. The challenges children face are so significant that they amount to a state of emergency.
I have taken the difficult decision to identify the places where the data suggests childhood is hardest. The findings are not intended to label communities or diminish local pride. Nor are they a performance judgement of individual councils, but simply an assessment of children’s challenges, the services available to them and the outcomes they experience.
The poor outcomes and serious gaps in support cannot be ignored. The status quo cannot be accepted, seen as inevitable or allowed to continue because the challenges are complex.
The challenge is not confined to a handful of places. No area is consistently performing well across the full range of measures – even places scored higher overall have significant gaps in support for children, for example, even in the better performing areas, over 20 per cent of children are not achieving a good level of development by Reception.
Every community has work to do. Our children deserve better.
The Childhood Lottery comes at a crucial moment. The government’s programme of devolution is set to transfer power and decision making to local and regional leaders.
Devolution is a once in a generation opportunity to make public services more responsive to the needs of children and families. Local leaders are best placed to understand the needs of their communities, bringing services together to address them.
That is why I have set out a test for devolution in The Childhood Lottery, to ensure children’s outcomes are at the heart of decision making. The proposals I have set out in tomorrow’s report are about making sure the systems work for children, rather than expecting children to live with the consequences when it does not.
The Childhood Lottery will give leaders a new way to understand the realities of childhood today. It will shine a light on where children face the greatest challenges, while showing there is no part of the country where we can afford complacency.
I know the publication of the data will not change children’s lives alone. Instead, it matters how we respond: whether national government acts on the evidence, whether local leaders take responsibility for children’s outcomes, and whether services work together to deliver the support children need.
The Childhood Lottery is a tool for change, allowing leaders to understand where childhood is hardest and identifying what is needed to improve, while learning from places that are overcoming the odds. Above all, I want the disparities children have experienced for years to be impossible to ignore going forward.
Children are rightly proud of where they grow up. They deserve to live in places that give them every chance to succeed, feel safe and opportunities to thrive.
Life chances should never be determined by a postcode. As we reshape how the country is governed, we have the opportunity to ensure that every decision, every service and every pound works towards that goal.
