Since 1891, Children North East has been determined to make a difference to the lives of babies, children, and young people throughout the North East of England. We’ve developed this work to the point that it now even extends across other parts of the UK. 

Each year that comes brings new changes and challenges, and each year we reflect on how we’ve addressed them in order to make a difference to young people. So, we’re very pleased to publish our 2022/2023 Impact Report, providing a detailed look at our achievements and the effect they’ve had.

The current climate: our actions in the face of adversity

In the North East and across the UK, we’ve seen policies fail to meet the basic needs of babies, children, young people and their families. The increased demand for our services has been stark, driven by the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis on families, continued cuts to funding for youth work, and the profound impact of COVID-19 on children and young people. 

In response, we’ve increased our policy work. One of the major focuses has been advocating for a basic standard of living for all, including calling on the Government to update benefits in line with inflation and scrap the two-child cap.

Now, we’re fervently campaigning for a national strategy that acknowledges and addresses child poverty (which affects a staggering 4.2 million children in the UK). Meeting the demand for our services and ensuring the stability of our core functions has been no small feat, but it’s one we’ve embraced with determination, creating spaces providing our local communities with the support they desperately need in the current economic climate.

Last March, our Cowgate space saw us open Cafe Hope: a hub for families from the local community to eat, stay warm, access services and build their support networks.

In Northumberland, where some towns have 65% of their households being identified as deprived, we’ve launched a new base to run services. Activities like these helped us grow the reach of our support by 10% this year, with 4,544 individuals accessing our services. 

A few facts and figures

From 2022 to 23, we’ve supported 4,544 individuals (the number of babies, children, young people and parents/carers accessing our frontline services and support, such as counselling, youth groups or family support). This figure represents a 10% increase in relation to last year (2021/22).

We’ve delivered 69 unique services and programmes to support babies, children, young people and families, and we’ve 1,456 in our supporter community engaged with our requests for donations, fundraising, volunteering and other types of support. This figure includes 402 individual fundraisers and 52 organisations who have donated or raised funds on our behalf (not capturing the diverse and wonderful range of groups and individuals who lend a helping hand to our teams). 

Our services and projects span every Local Authority area in the North East, and there are several areas across the UK where we’ve delivered Poverty Proofing® services to organisations.

One-off events – aside from regular services – supported families with respite and community. A much-needed day of fun taking over 70 children, teenagers, parents and carers on a trip to Cullercoats beach was a special highlight. Echoing the trip which started our charity 131 years ago, when founders John Lunn and John Watson took children from the city on a trip to Tynemouth beach to help their health, this was the first visit to the beach for some of the children. It’s an extremely powerful and important experience to provide. 

You can read more about our work supporting families in the Impact Report itself, where you’ll find case studies of specific services.

Improving and empowering young minds

Declining mental health amongst young people in the North East continues to grow year on year. In turn, this creates longer waiting lists for young people to be seen by qualified mental health practitioners, including counsellors and therapists. 

Our counselling team are adept at dealing with high referral rate, keeping waiting time to an absolute minimum (averaging six weeks). Counselling is adapted within different environments, delivering person-centred care. 100% of those accessing counselling stated their mental health has improved. 97% feel they have more strategies and feel more positive about their future.

One example of the impact of our work is our partnering with BU Wellbeing North Tyneside Learning Trust to offer 119 pupils the charity’s BU Wellbeing course: helping children and young people build resilience and develop positive techniques to manage their mental health. 

Gary Munday, Pastoral Guidance Officer at Monkseaton Middle School noted, “The children responded well to sessions, and we saw them grow into it as the weeks built up. The sessions have given students the skills, confidence, and resilience to support them to achieve.” One thing shining through feedback was the positive reflections of the pupils, with one even calling it “absolutely magnificent.”

Fundraising successes

Following pandemic restrictions, 2022-2023 was the first year we’ve seen some normality return to our fundraising calendar. Our supporters were as creative as ever: a 24-hour radio marathon, a challenge walk along Hadrian’s Wall, a zip slide from the Tyne Bridge – not to mention, of course, the iconic Geordie event, the Great North Run. 

Re-building some of our long-standing corporate relationships and developing new partnerships with businesses across the region has also been a real benefit to us. Chosen as Charity of the Year by a number of North East teams, we’ve worked closely with them on a diverse calendar of events – our Annual Fundraising Ball being one. This made a return after a pandemic hiatus, bringing many from our supporter community back together.

A key fundraiser in our work for over thirteen years is the People’s Postcode Lottery (PPL), raising £3.7m in funding by players to date. This year’s support has meant increased stability, ensuring our core functions are able to run smoothly and effectively, as well as keeping lifeline services running between funding contracts; vital support for young people and families has not been disrupted by funder timescales. 

Reaching further, raising more awareness

In 2021, there was significant growth of audiences on social media (11%) and for the newsletter (61%).

The number of website users has remained consistent with previous years, however users are now viewing more pages (by 19%) and are consuming more news and blogs shared by the charity (by 60%). 

As our UK-wide work increased, so did our audiences beyond the North East. Website audiences from London grew from an 8.2% share of visitors in 2021 to 19.6% in 2022.

We also saw the number of men in our audiences increase by 12% as part of a coordinated attempt to reach more dads and male caregivers. Improving accessibility was a key priority in 2022/23: this focus on raising awareness contributed to an increase in the use of our website accessibility support tools, including content translation by 1,230% and reading aid technology by 586%.

Moving forward to next year

View our full Impact Report here.

We’re sure you’ll agree 2022/2023 has been an impactful year for Children North East.

But we won’t stop there.

We won’t stop until every baby, child, and young person has the happy, healthy start in life they deserve. 

Your support means that we can be there when we are needed most. 

If you’re able to donate, fundraise, become a corporate sponsor, or support us in some other way, we’d be extremely grateful. 

Or for further information on our work and projects, get in touch.

“We’re a practice working at the deep end, looking after communities with significant deprivation”, shares Dr Guy Pilkington, Partner at Cruddas Park Surgery. “It’s a real issue. Day to day, patients are presenting with challenges connected to their income, housing or employment. It’s not always explicit, but these factors play a major part in their health.” 

Cruddas Park is situated in Elswick, which ranks in the top 1% of areas in the UK for deprivation, and was the first General Practice to take part in the Poverty Proofing® Health Settings. Guy was motivated to undergo the process because he “wanted to be a practice recognising these affects”, adding “we know our community. We were already ‘poverty minded’ but it was a good opportunity for the broader team to reflect and identify new areas for improvement.”  

“People engaged very positively. We sat together as team. It offered a way to validate some of the great things the staff were doing and a chance to sit together as a team, to be open.” 

The impact has been thoughtful and incremental, as the Cruddas Park team began sharing the report with leadership and partners, then developed a plan to work through recommendations identified through the Poverty Proofing process. “We’ve introduced more consistency into how staff approach charging for support letters, changed our advertising, increased signposting to services such as food bank vouchers and now fund access to welfare right support.” 

Guy shares the most thought-provoking consideration to emerge from the process was how the community is supported and encouraged to participate in the surgery.  

“We have a statutory participation group that provide insights, which we wanted to reinvigorate. Poverty Proofing has played an important role in encouraging our thinking about the group, for example we are doing more targeted recruitment in the hope of gaining representation from more diverse voices. The group will now be driving the wellbeing function of the surgery and we have a plan in place to gain charity status for them, giving them the opportunity to access funding to realise their ideas.” 

Guy is driven by a vision of the role a General Practice can play for communities and therefore in addressing social inequalities.  

“We need a power dynamic shift. General Practices are important neighbourhood institutions. We are a gateway to NHS services and medicine, as is expected, but we are also a community space where people bring complex lives and we have an important role to play in encouraging engagement with other community assets.” 

Children North East is proud to announce the publication of its most recent report, Change Now: the largest consultation it has conducted to date.

Consolidating learning from consultations with children and young people carried out since 2020, it brings together the voices of over 35,000 children and young people into a single report with a number of key recommendations for the North East of England. 

At the heart of Children North East is the desire for all children to be happy and healthy, safe and loved, resilient to challenges, and valued and confident. In order to achieve this mission, hearing – and listening to – first-hand experiences and feelings of young people across the North East is paramount. This report puts the voices of children and young people at the centre of understanding what’s important to them. 

With equality, empowerment and building relationships as core values, Children North East is excited to have completed a framework that embodies all three. Through this milestone publication, it ensures that those involved in improving key services – increasing children’s quality of life and opportunities – are informed by lived experiences of a wide range of young people across the region. 

So as to gather a truly full picture of young people’s lives and recommendations, the themes of consultations and projects were many and varied. Commissioned for a variety of purposes, all asking questions of children and young people in different contexts, every single one had children and young people – and their futures – at the centre. 

For a copy of the Children North East Change Now report, click here.

For more information about the Change Now report email Billie Jenkins, Communications and Fundraising Manager at [email protected].
To donate to Children North East, or to get involved in fundraising campaigns, visit ‘How You Can Help’ on the website.

Dealing with the impact of the sexual abuse of a child or young person can be a difficult and complex journey for the victim, as well as the family and those close to them. While it is estimated one in 20 children will experience some form of sexual abuse in the UK, finding the right support for recovery for victims and their families can be complicated. 

Children North East’s SAFE (Sexual Abuse Family Engagement) programme provides expert, specialist therapeutic support for victims and tailored support and information for family members. 

One family who was supported through the project shares their experience to inform and encourage others who may benefit from the service. 

“We feel lucky to have found Children North East at a time when our family needed your support most. We have found the support invaluable. Children North East’s response to our request for support was prompt and very responsive. 

Our child accessed an initial assessment very quickly and the course my wife and I were offered was unexpected but most welcome and most necessary.  

We were quickly offered a comprehensive and well-structured programme of support. The eight week course we undertook increased our knowledge base and enabled us to support our children and help our family recover from this unwanted adverse experience. 

Our allocated worker, Bernadette, was very skilled and put us at ease immediately. She tailored the course to meet our family’s specific situation and the support and guidance she offered felt both bespoke and responsive. Sensitive and difficult discussions were handled with kindness, gentleness and empathy; this has been hugely beneficial. 

We have finished the course and our family is now in a much stronger position to cope with the situation with successful outcomes for each member of our family. 

We strongly believe that awareness of this course to all professionals who support families dealing with the sexual abuse of children should be widened. Police, children’s social services, educational professionals and health professionals should all be in a position to signpost families to this service when they need it.” 

If you are a young person or family who has been the victim of sexual abuse, or work with someone who could benefit from the programme, you can make referrals to the SAFE team. The SAFE team can provide more information and support you to complete the referral process. To learn more about the programme and the referral process please visit our dedicated website page or contact Katie Graham on [email protected].  

Boy walks across school field

Since the pandemic, school avoidance (also known as school refusal) has been on the rise, with ‘persistent absence’ almost doubling since pre-Covid level according to the Department for Education. If you’re a parent or carer navigating school avoidance, you’re not alone. 

Children and teens who resist attending school regularly can find significant disruption to their education, social development and wellbeing, so it is an issue that many parents want to act on.  

Whether your child is outright refusing to attend school or shows signs of distress or depression when confronted with school attendance, there are positive actions families can take to support a pathway back to regular attendance. 

This short guide from Children North East shares some expert guidance and techniques to support your child or teen avoiding school. 

Establish a safe environment for communication 

Create a safe space at home where your child feels comfortable expressing their concerns about school. Encourage open dialogue without judgment, and actively listen to their worries and fears. Assure them that their feelings are valid and that you are there to support them every step of the way. 

Explore the causes, not just the symptoms 

Work together with your child to identify the underlying reasons behind their reluctance to attend school. Are they experiencing bullying, academic struggles, social anxiety or other stressors? Understanding the root causes is crucial in developing effective solutions tailored to your child’s needs. 

Work with the school 

Reach out to their teachers and other support staff to discuss your child’s situation and explore what help might be available. This could be informal adjustments or access to dedicated support services. Request a meeting to develop a plan that addresses your child’s needs and keep regular communication with school staff to understand developments. 

Establish a consistent routine 

Consistency and structure can help alleviate anxiety and provide a sense of stability for children experiencing school avoidance. Establish a daily routine that includes regular mealtimes, bedtime rituals, and time to relax doing things they enjoy. Consistency fosters a sense of predictability and security, which can be comforting for children experiencing emotional distress. 

Set achievable goals 

Break down the process of returning to school into manageable steps and set achievable goals with your child. Start with small milestones, such as attending school for part of a day or taking part in a favourite activity.  

Support them to develop coping strategies 

Equip your child with practical coping strategies to manage their anxiety and stress. There are lots of great resources you can access online such as through Coping Skills For Kids, Anna Freud and the Red Cross Self-Kindness Toolkit are good places to start. 

Encourage peer support 

Encourage your child to build positive relationships with classmates by arranging playdates, promoting group activities, or taking outings where they can socialise in a relaxed setting outside of school. Connecting with understanding friends can help reduce feelings of isolation and increase their sense of belonging.

Monitor progress and adjust as you go 

Keep track of your child’s progress in overcoming school avoidance and be prepared to change strategies as needed. Reflect on changes in their behaviour or wellbeing and seek professional guidance if you notice persistent difficulties.   

Celebrate every step 

Celebrating each success along the way, no matter how small, can reinforce positive behaviour and boost your child’s confidence. Offer words of encouragement, praise their efforts, and remind them of their strengths and resilience.  

If you’re a parent or carer and need support with School Avoidance or other mental health related challenges experienced by your child or teen, our Ways to Wellbeing programme has been developed to support you to better understand children and young people’s emotional development and to explore subjects related to mental health and wellbeing such as anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts and eating disorders.  

Learn more about Ways to Wellbeing >  

View more Ways to Wellbeing Resources > 

Our Chief Executive, Leigh Elliott, shares the charity’s view on the urgent need for a national approach to tackling Child Poverty from all sides.

In 1999, the government made a historic cross-party agreement to eradicate child poverty by 2020. At the time a quarter of British children were living below the poverty line. Yet as I write this, almost 25 years later, the situation has worsened; and growing regional inequality means that in the North East a shocking 35% of children are now growing up in poverty. The impact of austerity, Covid and the cost of living crisis is having a catastrophic impact on families who are struggling to pay for the basics – enough food, nappies and baby milk formula, school shoes.  

As one of the world’s strongest economies, it should be unthinkable that in the 21st century children in our communities are growing up in poverty. But this is the reality. And there is a deafening silence from our government in response to the issue.  

Our experience supporting babies, children, young people and their families tells us the reasons for child poverty are complex.  

Low-paid work, with wages that are not keeping up with inflation, is one of the biggest causes of child poverty; almost 70% of children living in poverty in the North East are in households where at least one parent works.  

The Universal Credit system is also failing families; eligibility criteria that penalise children with two or more siblings, and a basic entitlement that doesn’t cover the cost of essentials. For families who can’t work, and the millions whose meagre wages are topped up with Universal Credit, it’s still not enough to make ends meet.  

For many parents who are working – and others who want to work, the availability and cost of childcare, and the complex childcare funding system create another difficulty – parents have told us they can’t afford to go to work but they can’t afford not to. It’s an impossible dilemma – and it is children who are suffering.  

Our leaders need to acknowledge that child poverty is a problem, and one which needs to be tackled, for the benefit of the economy, the future of our society, and because it is the right thing to do. 

That’s why we are calling on the next government to commit to a new Child Poverty Strategy, which works across government, to address the issue from all angles. We need clear targets that drive forward action, to get more money in families’ pockets. And we need to remove the barriers preventing children in poverty from fully participating in society, achieving at school, and growing up happy and healthy.  

Children North East is campaigning to end child poverty for good, working alongside our Ambassador, Denise Welch, and the Sunday Mirror, calling for change to bring Hope not Hunger to our children. As part of the End Child Poverty Coalition, we are calling an end to the two-child limit which are keeping thousands of families in poverty. We are contributing to the work of the North East Child Poverty Coalition, looking for regional solutions to child poverty, and are championing the Real Living Wage, leading by example and challenging other employers to make work pay.  

Our pioneering Poverty Proofing© model is working in schools, healthcare settings and community venues to identify and remove obstacles that make it harder for people in. We know this makes a huge difference to people’s day to day life. 

We are playing our part, but we need a concerted, national approach that tackles poverty from all sides, and we are failing our children if we do not commit to eradicating it in our generation.