Is Medway really one of England’s hardest places to grow up?

Is Medway really one of England’s hardest places to grow up?

Medway Council is to hold a summit on children’s experiences after a major national study gave the area the lowest score in the South East.

The Children’s Commissioner’s Childhood Lottery report measures how easy or difficult it is to grow up in each part of England. Medway received 503 points, against an England average of 585 and a South East median of 626.

Kent scored 584. Every other local authority in the South East finished above Medway.

The report’s evidence lists Medway as the 10th lowest scoring eligible area in England, after four authorities with substantial gaps in their data were removed. In the complete dataset, which includes all 153 local authorities, Medway was ranked 140th.

It is a grim headline, but not quite a diagnosis.

The study brings together figures covering family life, health, education, employment, social care, community safety and children’s ability to participate in decisions. Some measure the work of councils. Others concern the NHS, police, schools, national policy or the economic circumstances into which children have had the discourtesy to be born.

Cllr Adam Price, Medway Council’s portfolio holder for children’s services, said the authority welcomed the commissioner’s focus and accepted that the report identified genuine challenges.

“The report highlights some of the challenges faced by children in Medway, alongside many areas where partners continue to work hard to improve outcomes for children in Medway,” he said.

The council has invited the Children’s Commissioner to a summit with local partners. Before everyone reaches for the lanyards, however, there is the small matter of deciding what the score actually tells us.

The Childhood Lottery is an unusually broad collection of evidence. Its 162 measures include nationally published statistics, data obtained directly from public bodies and answers given by children to the commissioner’s surveys.

Not all of those measures contribute to the final score. Some provide context, while others show how little local information is collected.

The scored measures are converted into marks from zero to ten, with ten representing the better result. Each then receives equal weight.

This makes the index legible. It also creates some odd equivalences.

A council can receive ten points for telling the commissioner that it has a youth council, a family hub or a particular support service. That answer does not reveal how often the service opens, how many children use it, whether there is a waiting list or whether anyone living on the other side of the authority can reasonably reach it.

Those ten points can carry the same weight as a measure of poverty, homelessness, educational performance or disruption in the life of a child in care. Which is a way of saying things are neat for the spreadsheet, but less neat for childhood.

The measures also come from different years. Medway Council points out that the underlying data span 2023 to 2026 and cover organisations with very different responsibilities.

“The equal weighting means each measure has the same potential influence on the overall score, regardless of the strength of evidence or their significance for children’s lives,” the council told Local Authority.

The Children’s Commissioner has subsequently defended the decision to publish the rankings, acknowledging that some people found them uncomfortable but arguing that the disparities were too large to ignore.

The commissioner does, however, make one important point clear: No area performed consistently well or consistently badly.

Medway is a particularly vivid demonstration of this.

On some measures, it performs extremely well.

The council recorded youth services expenditure of £205.50 for every person aged 13 to 19 during 2024-25. That was the highest figure in the South East, almost three times the regional median of £73.50 and nearly nine times Kent’s £23.20.

Medway was also among England’s highest-ranked areas for post-16 education availability. It had 1.9 mainstream post-16 providers for every 1,000 young people aged 17 to 19, compared with an England average of 1.2.

Around 64% of Medway children had seen an NHS dentist during the previous year, against 57% across England and 53% in Kent.

These are not trivial strengths.

The youth services figure is especially easy to misunderstand. It covers spending on educational and recreational activities, universal and targeted provision and local authority duties intended to help young people participate in education or training.

It is not a simple count of youth clubs or a measure of how many teenagers have somewhere useful to go in the evening.

In a recent Local Authority interview, Medway Council youth-service manager Roy Smith described work spanning youth clubs, targeted support, hospital provision and projects intended to get young people’s voices heard.

That helps explain the breadth of the spending category. It does not tell us how much provision each young person receives, how evenly it is distributed or how many children the expenditure reaches.

The contrast remains striking. Medway can report the region’s highest youth services expenditure and still receive its lowest overall childhood score.

The index cannot tell us whether the money is ineffective, unusually classified, concentrated on children with the greatest needs or supporting work that has yet to produce measurable results.

It does tell us that a large expenditure figure is not the same thing as a broadly positive experience of childhood.

Some of Medway’s weakest results are based on administrative records rather than children’s survey responses.

The most serious concerns involve children in care.

In 2024-25, 45% of Medway’s looked-after children experienced three or more social workers during the year. The figure was 24% across England and 27% in Kent. This means Medway had one of the highest recorded rates in the country.

This does not mean that each child changed social worker three times. It means they were assigned at least three different social workers during a single year.

Even so, it represents considerable disruption in a relationship that is supposed to provide consistency, trust and a route through an already complicated system. A council can have the right strategies, boards and service descriptions in place, but a child having to explain their life to yet another professional will experience the system rather differently.

The council attributed the result to workforce pressures affecting children’s services across the country.

“We also recognise that stability and strong relationships are particularly important for children in care,” Cllr Price said.

“The reported figures reflect ongoing workforce pressures that have affected children’s services nationally. However, we have been working to strengthen recruitment and retention, reduce reliance on agency staff where possible, and support social workers to build long-term relationships with children and families.”

Those pressures are not new. A 2024 report to the council’s children’s scrutiny committee said the service was not making sufficient progress in recruiting a permanent workforce despite its efforts, with vacancies still being filled by agency staff.

National pressures provide context, but they do not explain why Medway’s result was so much worse than the national figure.

The council did not provide a more recent instability rate, a numerical improvement target or the number of Medway children represented by the percentage. It said it would continue working to improve recruitment and retention.

There is a more positive recent assessment. As Local Authority reported earlier this year, an Ofsted focused visit found that most Medway children in care were living in stable homes and supported by social workers they trusted.

Inspectors also found that care planning remained inconsistent, while some children placed outside Medway were not receiving all the health, education and emotional support they needed.

Both findings can be true. A service can improve overall while a significant group of children still experiences instability.

There are concerns elsewhere in the report, too.

Only 21% of Medway Education, Health and Care Plans were reportedly completed within the statutory 20-week period. The England figure was 46%, while Kent recorded 57%.

The proportion of 16 and 17-year-olds not in education, employment or training was 6%, compared with 3% nationally and 5% in Kent.

Medway also spent 2% of its children and young people’s expenditure on targeted and universal family support, according to one contextual measure. The figure was 8% nationally and 9% in Kent.

Because this is an unscored context measure, it did not directly lower Medway’s final total. It may be rather more relevant to local policy than some of the measures that did.

Together, these figures offer more useful questions than the overall ranking. They concern services and outcomes that the council either controls or materially influences. They also provide something against which future improvement can be judged, which is more than can be said for a single grand total assembled from very different evidence.

Other poor results came from children’s own answers.

Some 25% of Medway respondents said they did not have fun activities near where they lived, compared with 15% across England.

Around 31% said they did not feel able to make a difference on issues that mattered to them, compared with 22% in England.

Some 19% said they did not have supportive teachers, compared with 10% nationally, while 19% said they felt unsafe in their local area, against 12% across England.

These findings stand out because they concern children’s experience rather than the existence of a service or the size of a budget. They are also among the figures that require the most caution.

The commissioner set a threshold of 385 child responses from each local authority for a sample to be considered representative at a 95% confidence level. Medway did not reach it.

The annex therefore omitted Medway from most of its published Big Ambition comparison tables, although the complete dataset still assigns it a ranking.

Medway Council says 11 of its 26 lowest-scoring measures were based on survey evidence. It also says it is unclear whether the local respondents were representative by age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation, disability, special educational needs or geography.

This is a fair objection. Ranking a council using survey findings that the report does not consider locally representative gives the resulting position a level of precision it has not necessarily earned.

That does not make the answers worthless. It means they should be treated as warning signals rather than precise estimates of what every child in Medway thinks.

The council has offered its own, considerably larger survey as a counterpoint.

Its Children and Young People Survey, conducted between May and December 2025, received 4,372 completed responses. Focus groups held in January involved a further 94 children and young people.

In that research, 81% said they liked or strongly liked their local area, up from 68% in the council’s 2021 survey. Some 77% felt safe or very safe where they lived, up from 59%, while 85% said they were happy or very happy with their lives, an increase from 64%.

Those are substantial improvements. They cannot simply be placed beside the Big Ambition percentages as if the surveys asked identical questions of identical groups in identical circumstances.

A child can like their area while also believing it lacks activities. They can describe themselves as happy while feeling unable to influence decisions. Different wording, recruitment methods and demographic profiles can produce different results without either survey necessarily being wrong.

There is a mild irony in responding to concerns about one survey's representativeness with another survey whose full methodology the council did not supply. The council’s larger sample is encouraging, but sample size alone does not determine who took part, who did not, or how the answers should be interpreted.

The council’s research presents a more positive picture. The commissioner’s survey identifies groups of children whose answers should not be dismissed merely because the local sample fell below a statistical threshold.

The sensible response is to understand who each exercise hears and who remains absent from both.

Cllr Price said the council would continue to focus on children with special educational needs and disabilities, reduce disadvantage, strengthen safeguarding, and provide support at the earliest opportunity.

It will now bring together partners from education, health, social care, the voluntary sector and local communities to discuss the commissioner’s findings.

Medway is right to resist treating a composite score as a definitive judgement on the council or the place. The commissioner is also right to ask why childhood still differs so widely between areas.

The proposed summit will be useful if it moves beyond the argument over league table positions and examines the gap between provision recorded in official returns and support experienced in everyday life.

The Childhood Lottery is an imperfect attempt to measure an old local government problem: access to stable care, timely help and ordinary opportunities still depends heavily on where a child lives.

Medway can argue about where it has been placed. The more useful question is what it will do to make the postcode matter less.

Footnotes

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