NSPCC chief: Councils ‘need to be ready’ for soaring children’s services demand
Fiona Simpson
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Local authorities “need to be ready” for a spike in referrals to children’s services departments as schools reopen, the chief executive of the NSPCC has said.
Speaking to CYP Now during the charity's How Safe 2021 conference, Peter Wanless said there is a “discrepancy between what the situation is in terms of what local authorities are seeing and the sorts of calls we are taking” on the charity’s Childline and the NSPCC helpline.
Wanless highlighted how during lockdown Childline had seen a rise in the proportion of children receiving counselling for concerns over their mental health and an increase in inter-familial sexual abuse
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Between April and November last year the NSPCC helpline also saw a 43 per cent increase in calls about abuse and neglect compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Of 31,359 calls about abuse received from adults concerned about the wellbeing of a child over the eight-month period, 4,796 related to contact sexual abuse (as opposed to online), 8,251 related to emotional abuse, 8,582 related to neglect and 8,302 related to physical abuse.
The remaining 1,428 calls related to online sexual abuse, latest figures show.
Wanless said it is still unclear if there will be an influx of referrals to children's services when schools reopen on 8 March, but added that "the system needs to be ready” in case.
New statistics from the Department for Education show that during the last week of January, the total number of referrals received by local authorities was 23 per cent lower than the usual number seen at that time of year.
Wanless also raised concerns over a lack of support for the youngest children both in terms of an increase in the number of babies killed or seriously injured during the first lockdown and relating to a delay in developmental progress due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Between April and September last year, Ofsted received 285 serious incident notifications, a 27 per cent increase on the same period in 2019/20, figures show.
More than a third (35.8 per cent) of incidents relate to a child under one compared with 30.4 per cent in the previous quarter, the figures show.
“We are especially worried about the vulnerability of tiny children,” Wanless said, “not just from the death and serious incident figures but also so much of a child’s development is formed in those early months and a year is an incredibly long time in the life of a small child.”
Helping families “come to terms” with a lack of support during the past year is an ongoing priority for the NSPCC, he added, highlighting the NSPCC’s work with Blackpool’s Better Start programme to support pregnant mothers and toddlers.
“All the way through lockdown, health visiting and the visibility of services to tiny babies and new families was really prioritised there in a way it wasn’t in the rest of the country as people rushed to support the issues and challenges raised directly with Covid-19, the more preventative early intervention services were plundered and that wasn’t the right thing to do,” he said.