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Briefing on the full Government response to the Online Harms White Paper

17 December 2020

Three years since the publication of a Green Paper, and over 18 months since a White Paper, the Government has announced its final plans for a new Online Safety Bill. The Children’s Commissioner welcomes this groundbreaking legislation, which is a significant step forward in combatting online harms. There is now much work to be done […]

Report

School attendance since September

15 December 2020

In March 2020 schools across England closed for nearly all pupils. Those allowed to attend rarely did, and even a partial re-opening of schools in July saw a peak school attendance of just 17.5%. By the time schools re-opened in September, 575 million days of school had been missed by children in England. The impact […]

Report
Children in art class at school

Children’s Commissioner podcast: Doncaster family hub

10 December 2020

In this episode, Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield visits a family hub in Doncaster.

Podcast

Access denied: How end-to-end encryption threatens children’s safety online

8 December 2020

This briefing aims to understand which apps and sites children and teens are using to communicate, and to find out more about what they are sharing on these platforms. In March 2020 we polled 2,003 children aged 8-17 on their use of messaging platforms, in an effort to understand the risks that these services may […]

Report
Social apps on phone

Who are they? Where are they? 2020

27 November 2020

Last year we produced our first annual report on children living in secure accommodation. ‘Who are they? Where are they?’ set out, as far as possible given limited available data, how many children in England are ‘locked up’ in many different kinds of institutions. The report found a relatively small group of children – 1,465 […]

Report
Vulnerable teenager

Children’s experiences in mental health wards

As part of our research into the experiences of children admitted to inpatient mental health wards, we carried out visits to four different Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) inpatient wards, including:  two general CAMHS wards, one Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) and one Specialist Eating Disorder Unit. The primary focus of the work […]

Report

Mean streets

25 November 2020

 Teenagers are consistently presented in the media as ‘trouble’, as perpetrators of crime and anti-social behaviour, alarming knife-wielding creatures lurking in groups in hoodies, mobile phones clamped to their ears. Some shopping centres even ban hoodies or use high-pitched ‘mosquito’ devices to prevent teens hanging around. But we have become concerned at the level […]

Report
Mean streets report

Gambling act review

19 November 2020

We’re submitting this briefing as evidence to the Government’s consultation on loot boxes in video games

Report
Video games controller on table

The children who no-one knows what to do with

11 November 2020

This paper summarises the findings of three years of work by the Children’s Commissioner’s Office and provides context for two further reports the Commissioner is publishing today (‘Private provision in children’s social care’ and ‘Stability index 2020’). The report explains the failure of local and national government to take responsibility for these children, and sets […]

Report

Private provision in children’s social care

The care system contains many talented and tireless staff who provide excellent care, but the unfortunate reality is that the system still fails some children. The yearly Stability Index for children in care produced by this office shows that 1 in 10 children in care experience two or more home moves during a year, and […]

Report

Stability index 2020

This analysis contains the 2020 update to the Stability Index: the Children’s Commissioner’s ongoing project measuring levels stability for children in care. This update focuses on the cohort of children who were in care on 31 March 2019. In previous years, this work has examined rates of stability for children in care across three domains: […]

Report

Some sort of normal

2 November 2020

All children have a fundamental right to get an education; the six months children spent out of school this year was the biggest disruption to that right since the second World War. Most children in England were unable to go to school for most, if not all, of lockdown, leading to the loss of roughly […]

Report
Teacher in classroom