The BBC commissioned 340 hours of new children’s programming in 2024/2025, and its content for kids was streamed 2.2 billion times on iPlayer. But it needs the government’s help to keep serving this audience.

Those are some of the topline takeaways from a 32-page Socioeconomic Impact of BBC Children’s and Education report that was released today after being teased by Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s and Education, at Kidscreen Summit last week.

The Beeb is currently going through a charter review process, which involves examining the pubcaster’s mission, and this new report is partly intended to highlight the value of BBC Children’s & Education. To that end, it notes that the BBC supports roughly 1,275 kids TV production jobs, as well as providing educational resources that help improve kids’ test results and even their social mobility. Most parents (89%) whose kids use BBC services say the broadcaster supports their children’s learning.

The report also quantifies the value of its news programming for kids. Longtime series Newsround reaches 3.5 million youth during school time, with seven- to 12-year-olds identifying it as their most-trusted news source. (Teens ages 13 to 16 rank it second, behind BBC News itself.)

Funding pressures 

The UK’s kids media sector is struggling because most broadcasters are not investing much in kids TV anymore, according to the report, which cites ITV closing its linear kids channel, Sky halting all kids content commissioning and Channel 5 only commissioning for a preschool audience. To make matters worse, SVODs are “inconsistently” investing in kids programming from the region—in fact, these platforms only made 12 hours of kids content with UK studios last year. And topping it all off, the BBC has less money to spend on kids content since it doesn’t have access to as much license fee revenue as it did a decade ago.

Graph courtesy of BBC’s socioeconomic report.

All of this creates an environment in which UK success stories like Blue Zoo Animation Studio (Wonderblocks) and Studio AKA (Hey Duggee) are less likely to emerge, the report says: “Without intervention, the UK risks losing culturally important content that reflects children’s lives and supports national outcomes in education, wellbeing and cohesion.”

A call for action 

The BBC is calling for four policy actions from the UK government to better support kids and public service media:

1. Modernized prominence: The government must enforce rules to ensure that UK kids content is highlighted on platforms and is easily accessible.
2. Promotion of trusted kids news sources on platforms where children are.
3. More investment in kids TV: The BBC wants to see the government enhance the Children’s Television Tax Credit Relief program, which allows studios to claim a deduction to reduce the amount of Corporation Tax they must pay.
4. Facilitate more partnerships: There needs to be more support for partnerships between pubcasters, commercial broadcasters, streamers, screen agencies and distributors. Co-commissioning and collaboration is increasingly necessary to get content made, and together, these companies can commission more local content.

“Without specific action, there is a real danger that the next generation will grow up without the culturally rooted, educationally rich and imaginative content they deserve,” said Hidalgo in a release about the report. “The BBC is working hard to meet their needs. But we cannot do it alone.”

Image courtesy of Alexander Svensson via Flickr.