A NEW app has revealed that close to fifteen hundred children in Harlow are living in a household with domestic violence.

The Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield has written to Harlow MP Robert Halfon in his capacity as the chair of the education committee and as a constituency MP, signposting an app known as CHLDRN as part of an awareness campaign.

The commissioner said:

“The role of Children’s Commissioner is to be the independent advocate for children in England. To ensure that local and national decision-makers can better understand and respond to the needs of children, my office has been reporting on the scale and types of childhood vulnerability in England since 2017.

We use the term ‘vulnerability’ in its broadest sense, with over 70 types of indicators to highlight any additional needs a child may have, including SEND, physical or mental health needs, issues within the family or threats outside the home. This work has shown that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, 2.3 million children in England were growing up with significant family risk factors such as domestic violence or parental addiction issues – of whom two-thirds were receiving no clear support.

Last year, we made this data available for each local authority in England. Now we are making it available at parliamentary constituency level. This is the first time ever that wide-ranging data on the needs of children has been produced for parliamentary consistuencies. The data can be find in our online app, CHLDRN, which provides the most complete picture of childhood vulnerability in each local area in England.

CHLDRN now allows you to effortlessly access statistics on over 130 measures of childhood vulnerability for your parliamentary constituency. You can find out how many children in your constituency have a social worker; have been exposed to domestic abuse; have special educational needs, or are at risk of falling out of education or being groomed by gangs. For example, for the first time you can get constituency level estimates of:

Over the next few weeks, we will be speaking to key agencies about these figures and what can be done and what is being done to protect vulnerable children.