Over the last few months, The Teesside Lead has reported on many of the issues children and young people in the region are grappling with, from rates of child criminal exploitation to the prevalence of illegal care settings. Now the Childhood Lottery report, published last week, has highlighted the true scale of these challenges.
The findings are bleak, but the response to them has been more hopeful. This week I heard from Middlesbrough mayor Chris Cooke and local youth workers about efforts to ensure where you grow up doesn’t determine whether or not you fulfil your potential.
In a new report by the Children’s Commissioner, Middlesbrough has been named one of the hardest places to grow up in England.
The council area was the lowest-ranked local authority in the Childhood Lottery report, which looked at metrics including education, health and safety to understand the challenges children and young people face today.
Nearly four in 10 children (38.8 per cent) were found to be in relative poverty, significantly higher than the 27 per cent national average. The borough also performed below the national average on measures of early development and GCSE attainment, and almost a quarter (22.3 per cent) of children said they feel unsafe in their local area, compared with 12.3 per cent nationally.
The Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said the findings of the report described the findings as a “national emergency,” noting “enormous disparities” between places and within regions around the country.
After visiting Middlesbrough recently and speaking to children there, she described it as “one of the most difficult places to be a child.”
What the Childhood Lottery reveals
The Children’s Commissioner used 162 measures of children’s lives to assess where in the country it is hardest to grow up, with each local authority allocated an overall score.
The data show the scale of the challenges faced by children across all areas, but it also highlights variation between the highest and lowest scoring areas.
The top-ranking local authority, Cheshire East, scored 730 out of a possible 960. Middlesbrough was 149th out of 149 publicly ranked local authorities, with a total score of 408.
Elsewhere in Teesside, Darlington scored 539 out of 960, Hartlepool scored 542, Redcar and Cleveland scored 549, and Stockton-on-Tees scored 576.
Middlesbrough’s mayor Chris Cooke criticised the report, saying it was a “label our children don’t deserve”, adding that headlines like these can “damage hope and limit ambition”.
He also expressed anger on behalf of the “thousands of people in our town who put their heart and soul into giving our young people the best chance in life”.
“Many of the findings in this research are sadly nothing new – they’re linked to multi-generational social problems, inequalities in funding and national policies going back decades,” Cooke said in a statement.
He has since told the media that the children’s commissioner “chose not to engage” with him while she was in the area, and called for different bodies to work together to “address the challenges”.
Investing in young people’s futures
Cooke has pointed out that the council recently embarked on a major project aimed at improving things for children and young people in the borough, investing £240,000 to ensure youth services are provided in every ward.
The council’s planned 10by10 scheme also aims to offer every child in Middlesbrough the opportunity to have 10 core, aspirational experiences by their 10th birthday.
“Helping children and young people is at the heart of everything I do as mayor,” Cooke told The Teesside Lead.
“An enormous amount of work has gone into this area already because every young person in our town deserves the chance to discover what they’re good at, enjoy themselves and have people around them who believe in them.”