'Postcode lottery' driving children's inequality in England, commissioner warns

Services for children are in a "state of emergency" and young people across England are facing extreme and unfair inequality, a new report says.

Children's Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza has analysed a hundred different metrics including health and social care, education, safety and play, concluding that a "postcode lottery" has resulted in a "litany of failures" affecting children.

Her report, called the Childhood Lottery, found that deprivation alone could not explain the differences in their experiences.

Some poorer areas had scored highly in her analysis compared to relatively well-off ones.

Dame Rachel called for a minimum standard for children's services, and an emergency fund for improvements where needed.

She said she had previously resisted the call to "reduce everything to funding", but the "extent of failure is too great".

In her report she wrote that should could not see the status quo as "anything less than a national emergency".

She urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to give larger local authorities and mayors more of a role in providing better education, health, youth services and policing for children.

The report reveals that:

• More than one million children had been referred to mental health services in 2024-25

• 55% of children do not achieve a good standard in English and maths GCSEs

• A million people in the UK aged 16-24 are not in employment, education or training

• 12% of children said they did not feel safe in their local area

Middlesborough, Hounslow, Bradford, Nottingham, Halton, Peterborough, Leicester, Liverpool, Sunderland and Medway were ranked the hardest places to grow up in England.

Cheshire East, Merton, Surrey, Richmond upon Thames, Hertfordshire, Cheshire West and Chester, Haringey, Leicestershire, Central Bedfordshire and Wokingham were described as the "least challenging places to be a child".

In some cases the difference in standard was stark.

It took six days for a child to be referred for mental health assessments in Leicester, and 118 days in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

In Richmond upon Thames, 70% of children got good grades in English and maths GCSE compared to 31% in Knowsley.

Just 6.7% of children in Bedford felt unsafe in their local area, compared to 24.9% of children in Croydon.

In four local council areas, spending on youth services per teenager was zero.

86% of Redcar and Cleveland's children saw a dentist in the last year compared to 39% in Hackney, which was among 25 areas where fewer than half of children saw a dentist.

General poverty was not always to blame for poor children's services, the report found, external.

Haringey in North London scored highly in an assessment of its services for children, despite having high levels of deprivation. Conversely Cambridge was ranked lower, even though it was one of the least deprived areas in England.

Dame Rachel recommended there should be a minimum set of standards for the way children were affected by levels of education, policing, health, and youth services.

"Strategic authorities", which include areas with mayors, and larger local councils, should be required to have a deputy mayor for children with responsibility for testing every policy to assess its impact, she said.

A children's emergency fund should be set up to pay for improvements in services, she added.

In a separate article for the Times, external on Monday, the prime minister promised more investment in "the success of our young people" and said the government could no longer support their "failure through the benefits system."