Reporting on Children’s Well-being: The State of London’s Children Reports

Monitoring and reporting on the well-being of children has a central role to play in the development of policies to improve children's lives. This paper uses two reports on child well-being – the State of London's Children Reports – as exemplars to show how regular reporting on children can be linked to planning and policy-making in an urban environment. The paper describes how the some of the themes and key findings from the State of London's Children Reports are being taken forward through policies to improve the lives of London children. The paper also draws on the process of researching and writing the reports in a discussion of some broader issues relating to child well-being measurement, focusing particularly on the integration of children's own conceptions of their well-being within the processes of indicator development and reporting. The author proposes that children's perspectives on what constitutes their well-being should be integrated alongside and together with more adult-oriented measures; and that work to involve children in child well-being development should make a clear contribution to policies which are aimed at improving the lives of children.