Prevention Programme 2023-25: A focused evaluation report
This report explores how the Prevention Programme, delivered by The Children’s Society and funded by the Home Office, works in England and Wales to prevent child exploitation, and how it has engaged a range of partners to deliver improvements in the support for children and young people at risk from child exploitation.
31 pages
About Prevention
About Prevention
The Prevention Programme is delivered by The Children ’ s Society and has been funded by the Home Office since 2019. The programme works in England and Wales to tackle child exploitation through a blend of national campaigning and deep local partnership working. It supports professionals in flexible ways to identify and better respond to exploitation.
About Prevention
For the 2023 to 2025 period, the programme delivered a range of activities focused on eight priorities:
- Deliver targeted, systems-focused work with businesses in the night-time economy to improve their response to child exploitation and abuse
- Support better responses to young people impacted by child exploitation as they transition to adulthood
- Embed equity and inclusion in tackling child exploitation and abuse
- Develop and deliver a programme of youth consultation to amplify the voices of young people and inform both the work of the programme and the wider sector
- Identify and respond to emerging and under-recognised forms of child exploitation and the links between exploitation and children going missing
- Improve awareness of and responses to child financial exploitation at the national level
- Raise awareness of child exploitation through The Children’s Society’s #LookCloser campaign
- Embed disruption within safeguarding practice
Evaluation approach
Evaluation approach
This evaluation explored the following key questions:
- How has the scale, nature and focus of activities delivered by the Prevention Programme evolved over time?
- What does this tell us about the programme’s emerging impact?
- What mechanisms or factors in the programme’s work on the night-time economy are enabling change and what barriers are limiting its impact?
Evaluation
These questions were explored through whole-programme internal monitoring data, six interviews and two focus groups with Prevention Programme team members, eight interviews with external partners, and survey data of:
- 3,189 responses from professionals following attendance at the Prevention Programme’s #LookCloser learning sessions. Sessions covered a range of topics such as transitions to adulthood, disrupting exploitation, financial exploitation, and safeguarding transgender young people from exploitation
- 1,887 responses from professionals attending other types of training provided by the Prevention Programme team
Summary of findings
Between April 2023 and March 2025, the Prevention Programme delivered 730 activities, particularly as part of its #LookCloser campaign, and commonly in partnership with the police. Activities focused on influencing systems, knowledge mobilisation, and building evidence.
We had:
- 680,000 engagements with the programme
- 97 activities related to building evidence
- 59% of all activities focused on systems change
- Over a third of activities delivered in partnership with police
The #LookCloser campaign increased professionals’ knowledge and confidence in identifying signs of exploitation. Other Prevention Programme activities also appeared to have an impact on influencing systems and safeguarding practices. Survey responses from professionals who attended the Prevention Programme’s #LookCloser learning sessions found that:
- 93% felt better prepared to identify signs of child exploitation
- 94% felt their knowledge of child exploitation have improved
- 96% felt confident in implementing learning from sessions into practice
- 81% felt that the session challenged an assumption or bias that they had held in relation to children and young people
