1. No clinical content, ever
We do not diagnose, screen, assess or suggest treatment for anything. We do not write about a child's mental illness, therapy, medication, self harm, eating or trauma, and we do not write about safeguarding incidents. We publish no warning sign lists and no symptom checklists, because such a list invites an adult to reach a conclusion about a child that only a clinician who can see that child is placed to reach.
Where a subject inevitably approaches that boundary, the piece stops and says so, and points to the GP, the health visitor or the special educational needs coordinator at the child's setting. That referral line appears on every article that goes anywhere near the line.
2. Nothing invented
We do not invent a study, an author, a statistic, an effect size, an expert, a school, a venue, a price or a case. If a piece cannot be written truthfully in the form intended, we change the piece rather than the truth. Where a ranked list of organisations would be the obvious format and we have not assessed any of them, we publish criteria instead.
3. Evidence described in words
We describe research qualitatively rather than reproducing figures stripped of their context. We do not present an average age as a rule, and we treat a single result as a single result. We state what a body of evidence does not reach as prominently as what it supports, which is the purpose of the paired block that appears in every article.
4. Institution level sources only
We cite bodies and published frameworks whose existence is not in doubt: the NHS, NICE, the Education Endowment Foundation, published Ofsted research reviews, the Department for Education, the British Psychological Society, Cochrane, journals indexed in PubMed, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the National Literacy Trust and the statutory early years frameworks of the four nations. Every external link on this site is marked nofollow.
5. Never prescriptive, never guilt inducing
We do not issue routines, quotas, targets or techniques. We do not tell a reader that they are doing it wrong. A great deal of writing about children works by raising anxiety and then selling its relief, and we regard that as a design choice rather than an accident.
6. The commercial firewall
Paid listings are alphabetical, labelled and unscored. The newsletter sponsor line is labelled and sits below the editorial. Neither can buy editorial mention, a position, a review before publication, the removal of accurate material, or any change to an evidence framing. We publish what we refuse to list at any price at criteria and rates.
7. Corrections
If something here is inaccurate, write to us through contact with the reference and, if you have it, the correct position. We correct with a visible note. We do not remove accurate material on request, from anybody, whether or not they have paid us for a listing.
8. How this site is made
Pages are generated from a static build. Imagery is generated rather than photographed, is identified as such in this paragraph, and contains no children, no adults and no real places, which is a deliberate choice for a publication about childhood that does not wish to trade in pictures of somebody else's child.