Nursery World - Children’s services ‘pushed to breaking point’, analysis reveals

Children's charities are warning that the system is reaching crisis point, in the run-up to the Chancellor's one-year Spending Review in late November, which will focus on protecting jobs and responding to the Covid-19 pandemic,

Ahead of the review, five leading children’s charities have submitted new analysis to the Treasury, detailing the scale of the funding gap which threatens to push children’s services ‘to breaking point’.

Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, National Children’s Bureau and the NSPCC are urging chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, to level up local authority finances to help protect England’s poorest children.

The analysis reveals that even before the pandemic hit, these services were facing a funding crisis.
In 2018/19, local authorities were operating with £2.2 billion less funding for children than in 2010/11, and their decreasing resource was affecting their ability to support and protect young people.

Coronavirus has placed an already struggling system under unsupportable strain, and is likely to worsen the trend in spending that has seen early intervention services, which aim to prevent situations from reaching a crisis point, lose 46 per cent of their funding over the last decade.

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