Daily roundup: Self-harm; Manchester serious case review; and redundancies at the DfE

Increasing numbers of children are self-harming, with ever younger children being affected by the issue, a group of charities has said. ChildLine, YouthNet, YoungMinds and the website selfharm.co.uk have released new figures to coincide with self-harm awareness day today. ChildLine says that it has seen a 167 per cent increase in people getting in touch about the problem over two years. It adds that children as young as 10 are calling helplines to say they have self-harmed.

A total of 55 opportunities to remove a girl from the mother who eventually killed her were missed by seven agencies, a serious case review has found. The Metro reports that four-year-old Kaiya Blake was killed by her mother who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A 65-page serious case review on behalf of Manchester Safeguarding Children Board was critical of “poor judgment and a lack of robustness in managerial oversight” among agencies that had contact with the family, including social workers, health workers, police, council officers, and child protection teams.

Lawyers have told the Department for Education that it could face hundreds of unfair dismissal claims if it pushes ahead with plans to axe about 1,000 jobs and cut its costs by 50 per cent. The BBC reports that lawyers acting for civil service union PCS wrote to the DfE calling on officials to follow agreed redundancy procedures. Union members at the department have begun a programme of industrial action over the cuts, with a short walkout due to take place next Thursday.

Children as young as eight will be given support to address problematic sexual behaviour following the extension of a scheme in Bristol and South Gloucestershire. The BBC reports that the Be Safe Children's Service, run by North Bristol NHS Trust and Barnardo's South West, currently works with 13-to 17-year-olds. Following £450,000 in Big Lottery funding, it will extend provision to cover children as young as eight.

Mental health services are to be rolled out to 70 schools in an attempt to help children cope with the transition from primary to secondary school. The work is being funded by a £2m donation from the Private Equity Foundation to the charity Place2Be, which currently works in 174 schools, with around 64,000 children in some of the most deprived parts of the UK. The funding will allow the charity to expand its reach to more secondary schools, with an estimated 25,000 children set to benefit.

And finally, a group of churches has accused the government of deliberately misusing evidence and statistics to misrepresent the plight of the poor. A joint report by the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union, claims evidence has been skewed to put the blame for poverty at the door of the poor themselves. The churches argue that the complex reasons behind poverty are being ignored.