Co-production vital across child services

The first session of this year's Conservative Party conference is set to focus on education, housing and political participation. All three policy issues have, in recent years, under the same party's watch, produced deep fissures of concern, pushing many young people to the margins and causing anxiety, frustration and sometimes alienation. At the heart of this lies a dramatic deterioration in the subjective emotional wellbeing of children and young people, who are struggling to find out where they fit in the modern world. The Children's Society Good Childhood report 2017 is testament to that.

I hope another recent report, Making Young Minds Matter, by Respublica for Barnardo's, has also crossed their radar. It argues that the government must renew its focus on supporting young people facing difficulty and disadvantage, "providing them with the right support early in their lives so that they have the best possible chance of growing up to become active and valued contributors to society".