The Childhood Lottery -Children’s Commissioners Report

Children's Commissioner: The Childhood Lottery

The Children’s Commissioner released a report in October 2026, discussing the ‘Childhood Lottery’ – how children’s birthplace/hometown substantially changes their lived experiences and prospects for the future.

The report assembled 162 measures of children’s lives, to compare which areas are the most challenging to grow up in.

Details

Macro trends

• While there are exceptions, lower scores tended to correlate with poorer geographical areas, while more affluent locales tended to score higher across metrics.
• Similarly, there is a north-south divide in the country, showing that children in northern England are more likely to encounter difficulties growing up (although outliers in both regions exist).

Granular findings

• Education
  • Children could be more than 250 times more likely to be missing from education in some areas (Blackpool (8.3%) vs Lambeth (0.03%)). Missing from education, in turn, puts children at a higher risk of exploitation.
• Community
  • Youth services can be critical to provide children with activities and divert them from potentially harmful activities. This is highly influenced by spending, which varies greatly between areas - four local authorities spend £0/teenager on children, while others spend £421/teenager.
• Poverty
  • Some areas are significantly more affected than others: 10.6% of children are in poverty in Richmond upon Thames, compared to 50.3% in Tower Hamlets, just on the other side of London. Poverty, in turn, can affect children’s outcomes in a range of ways (for more details on poverty, click here).
• Justice service
  • Children could be 14 times more likely to be stopped and searched in some areas (West Mercia (20 per 10,000 children) vs Merseyside (279/10,000)).
    • 22 police forces did not record any additional vulnerabilities of stopped and searched children (including considering criminal exploitation, which would be crucial for safeguarding response purposes).
    • Moreover, various local authorities do not have a targeted youth group for children to provide a safeguarding response (e.g., considering whether the child is being criminally exploited). 18 local authorities did not have a targeted group for sexual exploitation, and 13 did not have one for criminal exploitation.
  • Children are ~10 times more likely to undergo an NRM referral in some places than others (Cumbria (1.5 children per 10,000) vs Kent (14.2/10,000)).
  • Median time taken for a successful police outcome in cases involving child victims also differed significantly, ranging from 6 days (South Yorkshire Police) to 449 days (Devon and Cornwall Police).
  • Children in some areas could be almost five times more likely to get arrested (Dorset (17/10,000 children) vs Durham (79/10,000)).
  • In some places, police forces recorded using five times as many use-of-force tactics on children (Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire (31/10,000 children) vs Westmorland and Furness, and Cumberland (150/10,000)).
  • 36 local authorities are covered by police forces that do not routinely offer legal advice to children in custody.
  • In relation to criminal justice outcomes,
    • Some places award cautions in over half of cases (Cornwall), while in others the rate is at 1.5% (Liverpool).
    • Similarly, some local authorities have no children sentenced to custody, whereas at others the proportion is over 10%.
    • Meanwhile, some local authorities use referral orders in 66% of cases, while others do so 10% of the time. Use of community orders also varied, with rates ranging from 32% to 0% across areas.

Commentary

Many authorities lack resources, initiatives or proper minimum standards to address various issues affecting children. Too often, there is no appropriate intervention or safeguarding response (e.g., via education or employment pathways) that would prevent/deter children from dangerous activities (e.g., harming others or becoming a victim of exploitation).

Practitioners should be mindful of these differences to understand how factors beyond children’s control are responsible for their (even legal) predicaments, and to respond appropriately. Moreover, the divergences in approaches between local authorities could provide practitioners with a lens to

• advocate for approaches/initiatives that have worked in other areas (e.g., safeguarding responses and target groups),
• scrutinise unfair treatment or procedures based on comparative statistics (e.g., arrest/detention rates, and duration of cases), or
• question the equality of outcomes in the youth justice system (e.g., differing rates of out-of-court resolutions between areas).