Discussion paper: Making Brexit work for Children – The impact of Brexit on children and young people

There has been very little consideration to date of the specific impact of Brexit on children. Nor has there been much effort to consider the very distinct implications of Brexit for children living in the devolved nations of the UK. This is in spite of the fact hat children represent one fifth of the European Union (EU) population and one quarter of the UK population.

The EU has enacted over 80 legal instruments that confer direct entitlement for children covering issues such as migration, asylum, child protection, health and safety, paediatric medicine, access to social and economic rights and cross-border family breakdown.

In more recent months, MPs and Peers have been engaging with experts from the children’s
sector, including practitioners, civil society organisations and academics, to better understand how children are affected by Brexit, and have called on the Government to ensure that the impact of Brexit on children is considered in a more meaningful way during the negotiations.

To facilitate the transmission of informed and co-ordinated responses to those involved in the Brexit negotiations , children’s experts from across the UK have come together to form the coalition looking at the impact of Brexit on children.

This briefing paper is intended to help to ensure that the impact of Brexit on children is considered at all stages of the exiting process. It provides an overview of the most pressing issues that have so far been identified. Further work will take place to explore these issues in more depth, especially within the context of the devolved nations.

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