Since The child’s right? The provision of independent advocacy within the context of children’s rights was first written in 2013, the language of children’s rights, participation and advocacy has continued to move into the centre of policy discourse. Yet this has not resolved the central tension identified in the original paper: that children may possess a recognised right to be heard, but still depend upon adult systems, adult permissions and adult thresholds before that right becomes practical, timely and meaningful. The subsequent policy period has therefore been one of both development and repetition. The child’s voice has been more frequently named, and in many respects more seriously regarded, but it still too often must travel through systems that remain complex, fragmented and unevenly resourced.
There have, nevertheless, been important positive developments. Recent government policy has placed renewed emphasis on the importance of relationships for children who are care experienced. In Enduring Relationships, the Department for Education argues that children in care should be helped to sustain the people and connections that matter to them, including family members, siblings, carers, friends and wider trusted adults (2026). This is a significant shift in emphasis. It recognises that care is not only a placement, a plan or a statutory status, but a lived experience made tolerable, and sometimes transformative, through continuity, trust and belonging. Within this framework, advocacy is no longer best understood only as a complaints mechanism or procedural safeguard. It is also a means by which children can explain which relationships matter to them and why, particularly when professionals are making decisions that may alter the shape of their lives.
This policy direction strengthens, rather than softens, the argument for independent advocacy. If a care system is to take enduring relationships seriously, it must also take seriously the child’s account of those relationships. The significance of a brother, former foster carer, residential worker, grandparent, teacher, friend, neighbour or community connection may not be legible in a care plan unless the child is helped to describe it. Equally, the absence of advocacy may mean that relationships are severed not because they are unsafe or unimportant, but because no-one has supported the child to explain their meaning. Advocacy therefore becomes a relational safeguard. It helps protect the child from the administrative tidiness of adult decision-making, where permanence, placement sufficiency, risk management and resource pressures may otherwise override the quieter but deeply consequential claims of attachment, memory and belonging.
The work of the Children’s Commissioner for England also suggests that advocacy has become more visible within national scrutiny. The 2019 report Advocacy for Children focused on independent professional advocacy, to which children may be entitled by law or statutory guidance, and sought to examine the nature and consistency of provision across England (Children’s Commissioner for England). The later report, The state of children and young people’s advocacy services in England, makes an even stronger case for reform. It welcomes the movement towards proactive and opt-out advocacy but finds that the present system remains some distance from this ambition: many children are not referred, referrals do not always result in direct support, and there are continuing questions about independence, training, quality and consistency (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2023). These findings echo the concerns identified by Brady (2011) and discussed earlier in this paper: that advocacy provision can become a postcode lottery, shaped less by children’s rights than by local commissioning arrangements, professional awareness and organisational culture.
There are examples of more proactive practice. The Children’s Commissioner’s Help at Hand service has developed its work with children in care, care leavers and children living away from home, including children affected by serious concerns about the quality of their accommodation or care (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2023a). This is important because it reflects a more urgent and protective understanding of advocacy. It recognises that children may need independent help not only when they complain, but when adults are worried about the places in which they live, when placements are unstable, when moves are being considered, or when children’s own accounts of safety and belonging risk being lost within professional processes.
The question of independence remains especially important. An advocate must not only be independent in contractual or structural terms; they must be experienced by the child as independent. This distinction matters. Children who are looked after, subject to child protection processes, living in residential care, deprived of liberty, seeking asylum, disabled, or approaching adulthood through leaving care services may already be surrounded by adults who hold statutory duties, professional opinions and organisational loyalties. Some of those adults may be kind, skilled and committed, but their roles are rarely neutral. The distinctive value of advocacy lies in its capacity to stand beside the child without becoming another arm of the system. Where advocacy is commissioned by the same bodies whose decisions may need to be challenged, the appearance and reality of independence require careful protection (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2023).
The Children’s Commissioner’s more recent briefing on child victims’ access to advocacy also extends the argument beyond children who are formally looked after or making complaints about children’s social care. It identifies child victims of serious crime as a group whose need for independent advice, guidance and support is not always recognised, despite their exposure to violence, abuse, exploitation and complex justice processes (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2024). This is significant because it returns the debate to a wider rights-based foundation. Advocacy should not be understood only as a service for children already located within particular statutory categories. Rather, it is a mechanism by which children can understand their rights, navigate adult systems and be supported to speak where the consequences of silence might otherwise be profound.
There is, then, a clear line of continuity between the concerns I discussed in 2013 and the policy evidence that has followed. The language has changed, and in some respects has improved. There is now a more explicit recognition that children should not have to find advocacy by chance, through persistence, or only after harm has escalated into formal complaint. The emerging direction towards proactive, opt-out advocacy is therefore welcome, particularly if it is embedded at key points in a child’s journey: entry to care, review meetings, placement moves, changes of social worker, family time decisions, residential care concerns, preparation for leaving care, deprivation of liberty applications, and any circumstance in which the child’s relationships, safety or future are being substantially decided by others.
However, the central concern remains unresolved. Rights that depend upon professional discretion are vulnerable rights. A child who does not know that advocacy exists cannot meaningfully request it. A child who fears consequences may not ask for it. A child with communication needs may be wrongly assumed to have little to say. A child who has repeatedly been moved, disbelieved or disappointed may no longer expect adults to listen. For these children, an opt-in model is insufficient because it places the burden of access on the very person least likely to hold power within the system.
The years since 2013 have therefore not left the argument for independent advocacy behind; rather, they have strengthened it. Policy has become more relational, more rights-conscious and more willing to name the importance of children’s voices, but the practical entitlement to timely, independent and trusted advocacy remains uneven, conditional and too dependent on the adult systems it may need to challenge. The positive story is that advocacy is now more visible, more explicitly connected to children’s rights, and more closely linked to safety, relationships and lived experience. The remaining concern is that visibility is not the same as access, and access is not the same as impact.
The case for independent advocacy is therefore stronger now than it was in 2013. Not because children’s rights were less important then, but because subsequent policy and evidence have made clearer the cost of failing to translate those rights into routine practice. Advocacy should be understood as part of the infrastructure of safe and relational care. It is not an adjunct to good practice, nor a procedural courtesy to be offered when time allows. It is one of the ways in which the state can demonstrate that children in its care, or otherwise subject to its decisions, are not merely consulted but heard; not merely protected but respected; not only planned for but engaged with as rights-bearing persons whose accounts of their own lives carry weight.
The enduring question is therefore not whether children should have access to advocacy, but why access remains conditional, inconsistent and too often dependent on adult initiative and permission. If the care system now accepts that relationships endure beyond placements, meetings and episodes of intervention, then it must also accept that children need independent support to name, defend and preserve those relationships. Advocacy is not the whole answer to the failures of child voice, but without it the promise of Article 12 remains precarious, present in law and policy, but still too easily lost in practice.
References
Brady, L. (2011) Where is my advocate? A scoping report on advocacy services for children and young people in England. London: Office of the Children’s Commissioner.
Children’s Commissioner for England (2019) Advocacy for children. London: Children’s Commissioner for England.
Children’s Commissioner for England (2023) The state of children and young people’s advocacy services in England. London: Children’s Commissioner for England.
Children’s Commissioner for England (2023a) Help at Hand annual report 2022-2023. London: Children’s Commissioner for England.
Children’s Commissioner for England (2024) Child victims’ access to advocacy. London: Children’s Commissioner for England.
Department for Education (2026) Enduring relationships for care experienced children. London: Department for Education.
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1991) Convention on the Rights of the Child. Geneva: United Nations.