Why Low Cost Support for Children and Families Matters
In June 2026 the Children's Commissioner for England published her fifth annual report on children's mental health services. For the first time, more than a million children in England had an active referral to mental health services in a single year. That is around one child in ten. The figure has almost doubled since 2018 to 2019, and it rose by nearly ten per cent in the last year alone.
More than a third of those children were still waiting for treatment at the end of the year. Over sixty thousand of them had been waiting more than two years, up from around forty four thousand the year before. Real terms spending on those services went up by two per cent. Referrals went up by nearly ten.
What do those numbers mean for those of us living in Waltham Forest? Why is low cost and community based support often seen as an optional extra rather than an essential service.
The gap families fall into
If you are worried about your child in this the UK, you have roughly three options. You wait for NHS services, which are stretched to the point described above. You pay privately, which in London usually means a weekly cost that most households simply do not have. Or you manage on your own.
Most families end up in the third category. Not because they do not care, and not because the difficulty is not real, but because the first door is jammed and the second one has a price on it.
It is in this liminal space space where things get worse. A child who is struggling in October and gets some support in November has a very different year from a child who is struggling in October and gets an appointment eighteen months later. Nothing about the difficulty stays still while the family waits, it continues to grow. School gets harder. Friendships thin out. Parents start to feel they are failing at something they were never given any help with.
Money is not a side issue
Cost is not an unfortunate practicality, separate from the real clinical work.
The Children's Commissioner's report looked at deprivation for the first time this year, and found that children from more deprived areas are more likely to be referred to mental health services. That should not surprise anyone. Insecure housing, low pay, long hours, overcrowding and constant financial pressure are not background details in a child's life.
So we end up in a situation where the children most likely to be struggling are the least likely to be able to pay for help.
That is why we work on a pay what you can basis. Not as charity, and not as a discount for a lesser service, but because a service that excludes most of its community is not really a service for that community.
Why community, and not just clinics
Some children need individual therapy, and we will be offering it. But a great deal of what holds children steady is not clinical. It comes from adults who know them, from parents who have somewhere to take their own worry, from other families going through the same thing at the same time, from places where you can turn up without being assessed first.
Over the last few decades a lot of that ordinary support has thinned out, and at the same time more and more of children's difficulty has been routed towards specialist services. A million referrals is partly a story about children in distress. It is also a story about a society that has fewer and fewer other places to put its concern for children.
We are not going to fix the funding of national services from a room in Walthamstow. What we can do is make sure that some of the support does not depend on a referral, a diagnosis, a threshold or a waiting list. Our parenting groups exist for that reason. You do not need to be in crisis to come. You do not need a professional to say your worry is serious enough. You need a chair and a couple of hours.
What this looks like at Where We Start
We are a community interest company in Waltham Forest offering:
Therapy and counselling for children and adolescents
Support for parents and carers, individually and in groups
Community parenting groups in Walthamstow, open to anyone
All of it is offered on a low cost, pay what you can basis. Any money that comes in goes back into keeping the work running and reaching more families in the borough.
If you are somewhere in the gap right now, waiting for something that has not come, we would rather you got in touch than kept managing on your own.
