We cannot keep waiting for children to reach crisis before we understand what they need

The latest State of the Nation report from the Centre for Young Lives paints a deeply concerning picture of childhood vulnerability in England, with more children growing up in poverty, more families experiencing housing insecurity and financial pressure, and rising demand across mental health, SEND, social care and safeguarding services. At the same time, the systems designed to support children and families are increasingly struggling to respond early enough, creating what the report describes as a “perfect storm” in which vulnerability is increasing while meaningful support too often arrives only once difficulties have escalated.

For us, one of the most important messages within the report is not contained in any single statistic, but in what those statistics tell us about the way we understand children’s needs. If we want to improve outcomes, we have to become better at looking beyond the things we can immediately see and understanding what may be happening underneath them.

A child who is absent is not simply an attendance figure, just as a child whose behaviour is concerning is not simply a behaviour problem. A young person who has stopped engaging with learning is not necessarily making a straightforward choice not to participate, and someone who eventually leaves education altogether is unlikely to have become vulnerable on the day they disappeared from a register. In most cases, there is a much wider story developing around that child, and our ability to recognise that story early can fundamentally change what happens next.

What we see is often only the surface

In 2024/25, 176,361 children missed more than half of their education, which is more than three times the number recorded in 2017/18.

It would be understandable to look at a figure like this and conclude that England has an attendance problem, and of course attendance is a serious concern, but the report also makes clear that severe absence may be connected to unmet SEND, poor mental health, poverty, housing instability, safeguarding concerns, family adversity or a child’s experience of school as unsafe or inaccessible.

The absence matters, but understanding what is driving that absence is what gives us the best chance of changing it.

The same principle applies to behaviour. When children are living with uncertainty, stress, adversity or unmet need, their capacity to regulate emotions, concentrate, trust adults, manage relationships and engage in learning can all be affected. Recognising that context does not mean that every behaviour should simply be accepted, nor does it mean removing expectations or boundaries; it means ensuring that behaviour is understood properly before our response is reduced to correction or sanction.

That distinction is central to emotionally safe practice.

Emotionally safe practice does not mean lowering expectations

There remains a misconception that relational, trauma-informed or emotionally safe practice requires adults to expect less from children, when in reality we believe the opposite should be true. Every child deserves ambitious expectations, but expectations alone do not provide a child with the skills, relationships, adjustments or support they may need in order to meet them.

A sanction cannot teach emotional regulation, just as a reward cannot resolve an unidentified special educational need. An attendance target cannot address housing insecurity, and repeatedly telling a child that they should trust adults does not create the relationships and experiences through which trust develops.

Emotionally safe practice therefore asks professionals to remain curious about what is happening alongside maintaining clear and consistent expectations. Instead of asking only, “How do we stop this behaviour?”, we might also ask what is driving it, what this child currently needs in order to succeed, whether we have assumed skills that have not yet been developed, and what can be changed around the child while also supporting that child to grow.

This approach holds boundaries and compassion together, combining high expectations with high support, accountability with curiosity, and safety with a refusal to shame children for the difficulties they are experiencing.

That is not a softer approach to education; it is a more informed one.

Schools are carrying the symptoms of pressures far beyond the school gates

One of the clearest messages in the report is that childhood vulnerability cannot be divided neatly between education, health, social care, housing, safeguarding or employment because children do not experience their lives according to professional structures. Their emotional, educational, physical, social, financial and safeguarding needs are interconnected, and difficulties in one part of a child’s life will inevitably influence others.

Schools see the consequences of this every day. A teacher may notice a change in behaviour, a pastoral lead may see attendance beginning to decline, a SENDCo may recognise increasing dysregulation, while a safeguarding lead or family support worker may become aware that something outside school has changed. Viewed through separate professional lenses, these can appear to be different issues, but they may in fact be different parts of the same picture.

Schools are exceptionally well placed to notice when something is changing for a child, but they cannot, and should not, be expected to resolve poverty, insecure housing, mental ill-health, family adversity or gaps in specialist provision alone. The report is clear that schools require accessible routes to early help, stronger partnerships with health and social care, better information sharing and sufficient capacity to respond in relational and inclusive ways.

If we are serious about improving outcomes for vulnerable children, the systems around schools must therefore make acting on those early signals easier, rather than requiring a child’s situation to deteriorate sufficiently before support becomes available.

Early intervention is not simply about age

We talk a great deal about early intervention, but the phrase is sometimes interpreted primarily as intervention during the early years of childhood. In reality, early intervention also means responding early in the development of a difficulty, regardless of a child or young person’s age.

It means recognising occasional absence before it becomes severe absence, responding to anxiety before a child becomes completely disengaged from education, supporting dysregulation before repeated exclusion becomes the dominant response, and helping families before increasing difficulty develops into crisis. It also means noticing when a young person is beginning to lose their sense of belonging in education before they reach the point at which reconnecting feels almost impossible.

This is why the report’s call to move from a “crisis state” towards an “investment state” is so important.

Too often, children currently have to become unwell enough, absent enough, distressed enough or unsafe enough before the support available begins to match the seriousness of their need. By the time this happens, the child, family, school and wider services are all likely to be working significantly harder, while the possibility of a relatively straightforward intervention producing sustainable change may have reduced.

Preventative support is therefore not only a more compassionate approach; it is a more effective and sustainable use of the resources surrounding children and families.

We cannot ask individual services to solve systemic problems

More than 1.8 million children in England are now identified as having SEND, more than 1.27 million referrals were made to children and young people’s mental health services in 2024/25, and more than one million young people are not in education, employment or training. Figures on this scale should make us cautious about locating the problem solely within individual children. When levels of need are rising across such significant proportions of the population, we also have to look seriously at the systems and environments surrounding those children and consider whether they have the capacity, confidence and shared understanding required to respond early enough.

Building that capacity means giving professionals a common language for understanding vulnerability, strengthening relationships between education, health and social care, and helping adults recognise the important difference between a child who will not do something and one who, at that moment, cannot.

It also requires us to become much better at identifying what may be driving behaviour, absence and disengagement, rather than treating each visible difficulty as a separate problem managed by a different professional or service.

Behaviour gives us information

At Navigate, this is where we believe the conversation has to continue.

No school can remove every pressure affecting a child’s life, and no individual professional can resolve poverty, housing insecurity, waiting lists or gaps in specialist services. There is, however, enormous power in what happens when a child enters an environment where the adults around them are confident enough to notice, understand and respond to what they are communicating.

When behaviour prompts curiosity as well as consequence, when regulation is treated as something that can be explicitly taught rather than simply expected, and when relationships create enough emotional safety for children to take risks in learning, the possibility of change becomes much greater.

The same is true at a system level. When professionals across education, health and social care share language, understanding and responsibility, children are less likely to be passed repeatedly between thresholds and services while their needs continue to escalate.

The findings in the State of the Nation report matter because they are not simply telling us that more children are vulnerable. They are asking us to think much more carefully about how vulnerability is recognised, how quickly we respond when early signs emerge, and whether the systems around children are organised around prevention or around crisis.

The future of support for children and young people cannot depend on becoming increasingly sophisticated at managing problems once they have become severe. We need to become much better at recognising what children are communicating through changes in behaviour, attendance, relationships, regulation and engagement, and then creating the conditions in which meaningful support can begin before those difficulties become entrenched.

Children should not have to reach crisis before the adults and systems around them are able to understand what they need.