Charities come under fire for heavy child trafficking focus

Jill Rutter, senior research fellow for migration, equalities and citizenship at the think-tank IPPR, said charities stand to gain financially from working to tackle child trafficking and so were not paying enough attention to the problems facing migrant children.

"Trafficking raises money," she said. "I'm not arguing we shouldn't be concerned about it but, numerically, migrant children affected by parental worklessness and those who can't find jobs on leaving school are far higher."

Rutter's findings will appear in a book, Worlds on the Move: Educational and Welfare Responses to Changing Patterns of Child Migration, which is due out next year.

But Lisa Nandy, chair of the Refugee Children's Consortium, refuted the claims, saying it was not a competition for resources. "A huge amount of work is being done and we are investing our resources, time and energy into working with different groups of migrant children."