Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, has told a BBC programme that teachers and other professionals who do not report child abuse suspicions should face prosecution. Mr Starmer has told an edition of the BBC programme Panorama … [Read more...]

Children’s services in England need strong and stable leadership to bring about sustained improvement in the help, care and protection of our most vulnerable young people, Ofsted has claimed. It has also warned that only 40% of local authorities were … [Read more...]

Up to 80, 000 children in the UK are suffering from the symptoms of severe depression, according to public health agency National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and more needs to be done to care for them. New NHS guidelines said … [Read more...]

A survey of educational problems has found that children taken into care and those from poor, white. working-class backgrounds  lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. Pupils from poor white families are falling further behind boys and girls from … [Read more...]

The Centre for Social Justice has published �?No Quick Fix’, a report which shows that one in seven children in Britain is living with a substance-abusing parent, and 335,000 children are being brought up by drug-addicted parents. The hard-hitting … [Read more...]

Figures from the Department of Education show that more than 4,000 child protection plans – which are automatically implemented by social services departments for those registered as at risk – were initiated last year in England for babies still in … [Read more...]

A report published by Child Poverty Action Group, with co-funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has found that the minimum costs needed to provide a decent childhood have risen 4% in the last year. This compares with rises of just 1.8% for … [Read more...]

New research by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has suggested that almost half of  the country's seven-year-olds ldo not even take the one hour of exercise a day  -a figure which the UK's chief medical officers recommend as … [Read more...]

Some children could be forced to help meet the costs of being taken into care under a proposal by Worcestershire County Council. The Council has put put to consultation the idea to shift social care costs onto parents, carers and even children … [Read more...]