The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, has launched the Commissioner’s annual survey, this year named ‘The Big Future’ — the deadline for the completion of which is 23rd October 2026, and it can be answered by, or on behalf of, all children and young adults up to aged 25. There is a box to tick to say that you are a parent filling it in on behalf of a child, and parents can also answer it on behalf of their infants (aged 0), so it is legitimate to provide both adult and childlike responses to the questions. Parents may want to fill in the survey with, or on behalf of, their children, so that the Children’s Commissioner receives a range of responses from a breadth of families.
However, we have serious concerns about the objectives of the survey and the nature of some of the questions. The accompanying document, ‘The Big Future Stakeholder Toolkit’, explains the reasons behind the content of this year’s survey; making it clear that the State thinks it is responsible for the health and happiness of our children:
At a time when there is a mood of doubt across Westminster and the nation at large about how we raise our children today – from screentime to schooling, from future jobs to AI – we will be granting many of those same children the right to vote for the first. Yet, children consistently say they’re not heard and excluded from the debate.
It is important that parents are aware of the nature of the survey, especially as the ‘toolkit’ suggests that children could do the survey in class, supervised by their teachers and surrounded by their peers. Section 3 is ‘about me’ and asks for the child’s age, ‘gender’ and ethnicity. Under the section on ‘gender’ children can choose from ‘boy’, ‘girl’ and, remarkably, ‘other.’ This is shocking when one considers that the survey is designed to capture the views of all children. It means that young children might encounter the idea that some people believe in being ‘other’ than a boy or a girl, and this might be especially problematic if being guided on the process by a pro-trans teacher. It shows the Children’s Commissioner’s commitment to gender ideology and the practice of ‘transitioning’, despite the publication of Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2026 which mandates extreme caution when broaching the subject of gender dysphoria with children.
Question 4 asks the child-respondents more intrusive questions, such as who they live with and how they are educated. Included in the same section is the question, ‘do the people you live with make you feel loved and cared for?’ This is a troubling question – for children who sadly live in circumstances where they are genuinely not loved or adequately cared for, this question might well give the illusion that they are making a disclosure and might receive help, but instead they will just be filling in a vacuous survey. For some children, it may well trigger unhelpful thought processes and uncomfortable feelings that they cannot process or respond to appropriately. It may even validate for the children unduly negative emotions towards perfectly conscientious and loving parents, as a response, for instance, to their parents’ perfectly reasonable and caring discipline.
Given that this question is merely part of an anonymous survey, it raises troubling concerns about its true purpose. Will the Children’s Commissioner publish findings that say that a certain percentage of children are sad in their homes and use this as fuel in the State’s war on the natural family? It certainly seems that caution is warranted here.
Question 8 asks a deeply loaded question about their ‘worries’ for the future, presenting them with a list of specific issues that they presume they should be worried about, such as climate change and global conflict. Aside from the danger of political manipulation, the trouble with this approach is that it may lead vulnerable children to believe that there are indeed lots of major issues that they should be worrying about. The vast majority of the things listed in this question should not trouble children. Framing childhood as a time when they should be worrying about climate change or world conflict is disturbing indeed. It makes the survey feel a bit like a doom collecting exercise so that the Children’s Commissioner can put together an emotive presentation about how sad and worried all the kids are and what the Government needs to do about it.
An anonymous survey where there is no ability to check the data sets of those responding, in data collection terms is completely worthless. Ultimately, the ‘Big Futures’ survey reveals a woke leftist, anti-family agenda that frames childhood as a problem to be solved and the natural family unit as a threat to be mitigated. One purposeful response to the survey might be to expose its vacuousness and show that its agenda is anything but a real concern for children and for families.
ParentPower Team
