Care-experienced children make up half of those placed in youth custody and children in care in England are six times more likely than other young people to be cautioned or convicted of a crime” (The National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS), 2021).
NYAS has today launched a new campaign to reduce the criminalisation of children in care and care leavers across England and Wales. The ‘Trouble with the Law’ campaign urges all Police and Crime Commissioner candidates to recognise and support children care-experienced children and young people.
At present, care-experienced children make up half of those placed in youth custody. Children in care in England are six times more likely than other young people to be cautioned or convicted of a crime. Despite this, NYAS’ campaign highlights how care-experienced young people are often overlooked in local police and crime plans. The work of Police and Crime Commissioners can have a huge impact on the most vulnerable children, and the campaign demonstrates how critical it is that plans are made to support them.
Across the UK, around one in four of all identified or suspected child victims of trafficking were missing from care. The campaign seeks a child-centred approach to policing, where victims of exploitation are protected and supported, not criminalised.
The campaign asks candidates to sign up to the following pledges to:
1. Work to keep care-experienced young people out of the criminal justice system. 2. Never make policies about young people, without young people. 3. Protect victims of exploitation and missing children. 4. Campaign to end the life-long stigma of criminal records.
Rita Waters, NYAS Group Chief Executive, said “Police and Crime Commissioners have a unique and vast opportunity to change young people’s lives for the better. For too long, care-experienced children and young people have been more likely than their peers to be in contact with the criminal justice system. We are asking candidates to pledge to work with young people for a better future.”
NYAS Cymru chairs a National Steering Group called “Missing the Point” which brings together key stakeholders across Wales to develop a child’s rights approach to policing. Sharon Lovell, NYAS Cymru Chief Executive, said “I am encouraged by the level of commitment shown by Welsh Government, local authorities, the Youth Justice Board, third sector and all four Police Commissioners in Wales to reduce the criminalisation of young people in care; yet we need to do more. We have to provide every opportunity for young people in care to be protected from harm, receive preventative services, have a statutory right to a return interview whenever they go missing and be equal partners in shaping services in the future.”
You can follow our campaign and check if your local Police Commissioner candidates have signed our pledges by visiting our Trouble with the Law tracker here.
If you’re a Police and Crime Commissioner candidate in the 2021 election and would like to sign up to our pledges, please contact Joshua.williams@nyas.net
Follow the campaign on Twitter @NYASServices #TroubleWithTheLaw
Pupils who have lost six months of schooling can expect to lose approximately £40,000 each in income over their lifetime.
The cost of lost schooling to children affected by pandemic-related school closures has been estimated at £350bn.
A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that pupils who have lost six months of normal schooling could lose approximately £40,000 each in income over their lifetime.
For 8.7 million school children in the UK, this makes a total of around £350bn and a “massive injection” of resources is needed to help them catch up, the IFS said.
The paper suggested learning time could be maximised by allowing students to repeat a school year, lengthening the school day, or extending the academic year.
The IFS paper warned: “Without significant remedial action, lost learning will translate into reduced productivity, lower incomes, lower tax revenues, higher inequality and potentially expensive social
“The lack of urgency or national debate on how to address this problem is deeply worrying.
“The necessary responses are likely to be complex, hard and expensive. But the risks of spending ‘too much’ time or resources on this issue are far smaller than the risks of spending too little and letting lower skills and wider inequalities take root for generations to come.”
Luke Sibieta, research fellow at the IFS, said: “The inescapable conclusion is that lost learning represents a gigantic long-term risk for future prosperity, the public finances, the future path of inequality and wellbeing.https://interactive.news.sky.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus/world-country-rates/index.html
“We therefore need a policy response that is appropriate to the scale of the problem. One useful benchmark is the £30bn it normally costs for half a year of schooling in the UK.
“That doesn’t mean we need to spend that much. But it does strongly suggest that the £1.5bn allocated across the UK so far doesn’t even start to match the scale of the challenge. A much larger policy response would allow us to consider radical and properly resourced ways to help pupils catch up.”
But James Turner, chief executive of social mobility charity the Sutton Trust, said the long months of disruption would have “repercussions for many years to come”.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The government will need to put in place much more substantial catch-up funding to repair the damage to education caused by the pandemic, and all of this funding needs to go directly to schools and colleges.”
A government spokesperson said: “We will invest a further £300m in tutoring programmes, building on the existing £1bn COVID Catch Up Fund, but the prime minister was clear last week that extended schools closures have had a huge impact on pupils learning, which will take more than a year to make up.
“The government will work with parents, teachers and schools to develop a long-term plan to make sure pupils have the chance to make up their learning over the course of this parliament.”
The pandemic has had a deep impact on children, who are arriving in A&E in greater numbers and at younger ages after self-harming or taking overdoses, writes Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Children are a lost tribe in the pandemic. While they remain (for the most part) perplexingly immune to the health consequences of Covid-19, their lives and daily routines have been turned upside down.
Children in mental health crisis used to be brought to A&E about twice a week. Since the summer it’s been more like once or twice a day. Some as young as 10 have cut themselves, taken overdoses, or tried to asphyxiate themselves.
There was even one child aged eight.
Lockdown “massively exacerbates any pre-existing mental health issues – fears, anxieties, feelings of disconnection and isolation,” says A&E consultant Dave Greenhorn.
While Bradford has been in lockdown longer than some other parts of the country, there is no reason to believe this is a local problem. Dave says fellow A&E consultants he’s spoken to in Scotland, Portsmouth and Northern Ireland all report a significant increase in mental health attendances – among all age groups, children as well as adults.
Self-harming “used to be the mind-set of older teenagers but we are seeing much younger children doing this now” says Ruth Tolley, a matron on the paediatric ward where children are taken if it is not safe for them to return home.
It may then take the combined efforts of several nurses to prevent further self-harm on the ward.
Eating disorders are also on the rise, says paediatrician Helen Jepp. So are overdoses – where children take their parents’ medication, or their own – and cases where children rush out of the house and behave recklessly or dangerously on the street.
A child psychiatrist who works with Bradford’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) says the caseload fell at the start of the pandemic then returned to normal levels. For him what’s new is not the quantity but the severity of the work. “We have been seeing more intense distress,” he says. “Young people are in a worse state than usual.”
Consultant Dave Greenhorn describes a recent evening in A&E. It’s a busy one – there are 94 people in the department, including a pale-looking teenage boy, lying quietly in a cubicle.
Dave asks if he’s OK, but there is no answer and no eye contact.
The notes show that the boy has attended the Emergency Department every other day for two weeks. Before now he has taken small overdoses and told staff he wants to die. He has a child and adolescent psychiatrist and support worker but there is no firm diagnosis of mental illness.
One of the problems is that lockdown has prevented everyone from accessing their own safety valves. The boy has previously mentioned that he misses going out with his friends. Now he’s stuck at home, and so are other members of his family. Unable to get away for a few hours peace, the mum says she’s at the end of her tether and can’t deal with her son at home on this particular night.
Dave’s attempts to coax the boy to talk to him are unsuccessful, so he makes sure the youngster has some juice and a sandwich and asks the nurses to keep trying to get him to engage when they have a minute – though they rarely do.
On previous admissions to the paediatric ward the boy has been hard to look after, so it’s been agreed he shouldn’t be sent there, but he doesn’t want to go to an adult ward. In the end he spends the night in A&E.
The pandemic has underlined for all to see just how important school is for children. Education is only part of it. There is also the social life, and children benefit from routine, boundaries and adult authority figures outside the home.
Teachers are also experts at spotting problems such as anxiety and self-harm that has taken place at home. A lot of referrals would normally arise in this way.
For older children, school is the framework that will enable them to reach university or employment, and some struggle when it appears to give way.
Seema [not her real name] attempted suicide and started self-harming when exams were cancelled last summer.
“We tried very hard for our exams – you’re taught that your entire future revolves around these exams, but that crumbles right in front of you and it’s really shocking. It has a huge impact,” she says.
“I felt like stabbing myself… I was in a constant state of anxiety.”
Now 17, she is doing a lot better, though she still misses contact with teachers and friends, and would like schools to organise online groups for students to socialise, not just meet for lessons.
Her family hasn’t been able to understand her problem, but she has now been getting help.
One crucial beneficial change that has come out of this epidemic of mental ill-health is that professionals from all the different agencies in Bradford have come together to support the children in their time of crisis.
Gone are the delays in referrals between different teams – the health service and social services are acting as one.
“Covid has brought services closer together,” says paediatric ward matron Ruth Tolley. “We needed an urgent meeting with the safeguarding team and various other agencies and we were able to pull that meeting together in two hours – getting people together and getting a plan, that is really positive.”
Paediatrician Helen Jepps agrees. She got a call about a teenager one morning, logged on and saw that a number of teams were already discussing the case – social workers, Camhs and voluntary organisations. “It feels a real privilege at the moment to have that close contact,” she says.
But this is little consolation for the damage that is being done to children’s lives.
The past 10 months of lockdown and school closures may have seemed unending for parents, but for a 10-year-old it will have felt like a lifetime. Their youth is being stolen from them.
Prof John Wright, a doctor and epidemiologist, is head of the Bradford Institute for Health Research, and a veteran of cholera, HIV and Ebola epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is writing this diary for BBC News and recording from the hospital wards for BBC Radio.
