Archive

There have been big changes in our lives because of coronavirus, so we’ve created a children’s guide to coronavirus to help explain the situation. The guide aims to answer children’s questions about coronavirus, tell children how to stay safe and protect other people and how to help them make the best of their time at […]

Last week’s ‘Marmot Report: 10 Years On’ outlined the stark realities of health inequalities in Britain. It also demonstrated how these inequalities originate in childhood and persist through adult life. This paper highlights some of the main inequalities in child health, and the key responses to address this. Including measures we would like to see […]

Children are now more aware of their own mental health, and much more prepared to discuss it. This is very welcome. But children are also aware of how hard it is to get help, for them or for their friends. Accessing services remains the biggest issue for children’s mental health services. The stories I hear […]

“I feel like a parcel getting moved around all the time, getting opened up and sent back and moved on to somewhere else.” Teenage girl, in care over 100 miles from home There are over 30,000 looked after children living ‘out of area’ in England. This is 41% of all children in care and has […]

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a landmark agreement by governments around the world on the rights of children. As Children’s Commissioners it is central to our mission to make sure that those rights are made a reality for all children. The United Nations […]

This page was published in 2019 and may contain out of date information.  Know your rights to stay in Britain If you are an EU citizen living in Britain, Brexit will affect your rights. This means you will need to apply for what the Government calls ‘settled status’ in Britain. What is settled status? Settled […]

This is the first issue in our regular series of insights into the views and experiences of children in England.

The overwhelming majority of children (93 percent) in the UK play video games. Yet despite its popularity, the culture of ‘gaming’- its rules and its rituals, the varying profiles of players, the risks they face – tends to be spoken of by adults, whether they be policymakers or parents, as if it were an alien […]

The manifesto, published ahead of any upcoming General Election, calls on Britain’s political parties to include a six-point plan in their election manifestos to transform the life chances for disadvantaged children and to help all of England’s 12 million children to thrive. The manifesto sets out some of the key issues that children have told […]

Tackling the crisis of family homelessness in England

The Stability Index is an annual measure of the stability of the lives of children in care. It was first launched by the Children’s Commissioner in 2017 to shine a light on the issue of stability, provide data that allows stability to be monitored over time, and ultimately drive improvements in stability for children in […]

‘Children’s Voices: Children’s experiences of instability in the care system’ is published alongside the Children’s Commissioner’s third annual Stability Index, which measures stability in the care system by looking at how often children in care move home, school or social worker over a year. In addition to this data analysis, the Children’s Commissioner’s Office also […]