For many children, we are the only hope.

Every day, thousands of children and young people call ChildLine to talk about a problem they face. Hundreds of caring adults also call the NSPCC helpline because they are worried about a child’s safety.
We can only ensure we have the right amount of trained volunteers and professional counsellors to answer these calls with the right funding. We’ve calculated that answering one such call to ChildLine costs £4. Because it is run by qualified counsellors who are trained child protection officers, calls to the adult helpline are more expensive and add up to £10 per call. The reality behind these costs is quite mundane; we need to provide training to our staff and volunteers who answer these calls. We need buildings, phone lines, computers and supervisors…

At present and with current funding we can only answer two thirds of the 2.3 million calls we receive from children each year and three quarters of the calls we receive from adults concerned about the welfare of a child or infants too young to speak for themselves.

“As an advisor, I’ve on occasions had 13 young people queuing and I know that I’m not going to be able to speak to all of them.”
Liz Duncan, NSPCC online advisor.

Watch Liz talk about being a ChildLine counsellor

With your help, we can transform both helplines by 2011 so that we are able to answer more calls for help. Additionally we want to expand and give children a wider range of choices and options to contact us, for example online and we want to roll out these much needed service so they are available throughout the UK.

Our goal is to answer 90 per cent of all calls to ChildLine by 2011; this means provide counselling support for 1.2 million calls and 380,000 online and SMS contacts per year.

“The future is going to be very exciting for children; We will not only have ChildLine, the telephone service, but we will also have a text service and an online counselling service so that however a child wants to reach us, they can chose what suits them best.”
Esther Rantzen, NSPCC supporter.

Watch Esther Rantzen describe our vision for the service

The Government is providing £30 million but we need to raise a further £50 million over the next three years. This is a huge challenge but it has to be done if we want to increase our answer rate and expand our services to reach out to children using the technology they are familiar with and comfortable using.

Sadly, recent statistics show that our helplines are needed more than ever:

Last year, ChildLine counselled more children about sexual abuse than in it’s 22 years history. In the year 2007/08, 13,237 called ChildLine in confidence about suffering different kind of sexual abuse.

Find out more about this research

And in the last five years, the number of suicidal children counselled by ChildLine has tripled to an average of 60 per week.

Read more in our press release