Being here for children during a pandemic

Coronavirus has had a profound impact on all of us, including children and young people and the professionals dedicated to keeping them safe. 

Unfortunately, we have learnt through contacts with Childline and the NSPCC helpline that the pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the younger generation. 

Schools being closed to most pupils for months meant many children were unable to see their friends, extended families and support networks, leaving some struggling with their mental and emotional wellbeing. 

Worryingly the NSPCC helpline also revealed rising numbers suffering physical and emotional abuse at home. The challenge we faced at the charity, mirrored by many others working in the child protection sector, was how could we still be here for children while also ensuring all our staff were safe and fully complying with the restrictions put in place to try and curb the spread of the virus.

Ensuring our national helplines have remained open throughout the past year has been a major priority for us. Thankfully our staff and volunteers were quickly granted ‘key worker’ status by the government, enabling them to continue coming to our bases while most of the country was fully locked down. 

However, Childline in particular was hit hard by a sharp drop in the volunteers who are so crucial to the day-to-day running of the service. That we have managed to keep delivering counselling sessions to children and young people at similar levels to previous years is testament to the courage, commitment and professionalism of all those who were able to continue to cover the phones, 1-2-1 chats, emails and message boards. I am so proud of everything they have achieved. 

At the same time, the NSPCC helpline has received a record number of calls from adults concerned about the wellbeing of a child. The monthly read-outs from this service have painted a stark and harrowing picture of what life in the pandemic has been like for some children. They also reinforced how important it was that we kept our local services running in some shape or form to ensure children and families had access to specialist support from our practitioners.

To adapt, the NSPCC had to embrace the technology available, enabling us to move many of our services to be delivered over the phone and through video calls. Doing this in quick time was not easy and required a lot of resilience and agility from our staff and a lot of courage from the children and the families who we were helping. Out of the cases that remained open after lockdown was announced, almost 80 per cent continued to move forward with the service they had been receiving, which again is testament to how successful we were in making this switch. The other 20 per cent who could not continue at that time still received ‘safe and well’ checks from one of our practitioners.

Over the last year, operating online or in a hybrid way with some face-to-face engagement, has also taught us some valuable lessons for the future. Delivering services digitally has widened our reach and actually worked better for some children and families who feel less confident opening up in a face-to-face setting. 

Engaging with us in their own home has also helped them make financial savings through not having to travel. At the same time, we have found that virtual delivery of services is not so suitable for all cases, because it simply doesn’t offer the same window into a child’s life and important behavioural cues and body language that help inform a practitioner’s work with a young person.

As is the case for most organisations it is now important we do not forget the lessons of the past 12 months in a rush to ‘get back to normal’. From our perspective, there is clearly a value in providing a virtual or hybrid offer for some children and families across some services and some contexts rather than adopting a one size fits all approach. At the same time, it is important to recognise that for others face-to-face contact and direct engagement is vital to their treatment and recovery.

Our aim for the coming years is to work with many more people to make it easier for everyone to play their part in preventing child abuse and neglect. We want to transform the online world so that every child can go online and explore in safety and we will support children so they can speak out, feel safe, heard and understood, and abuse doesn’t shape their future. The key is that we continue to collaborate, adapt, evaluate and learn. This is a mindset that will hopefully ensure that we find some silver linings in what has been a truly awful year for children and an incredibly challenging time for all of us whose job it is to keep them safe

• This week, the NSPCC are sharing what they’ve learned from supporting children and families during the pandemic. This includes a new report that looks at the impact on children, families and frontline practitioners of using virtual and digital methods to provide support services. To find out more, visit www.nspcc.org.uk/covid  

Claire Johnson is director of services at the NSPCC