ChildLine and The Child's Voice Appeal

ChildLine is the UK's free, 24-hour helpline for children in distress or danger. Trained volunteer counsellors comfort, advise and protect children and young people who may feel they have nowhere else to turn.

Almost 1,400 volunteers provide a counselling service, supervised by a team of professional supervisors and managers. Every day our counsellors answer around 2,500 calls from children and young people looking for comfort, advice and protection.

The Child’s Voice Appeal

This is what everyone at the NSPCC dreads. What happens to a child who plucked up the courage to call for help, but didn’t get through?

With your help, we want to transform ChildLine and the NSPCC HelpLine to answer many more children's cries for help. So that whether they call, email, text or contact us online, we'll be here. To do this, the Government is providing £30 million and we need to raise a further £50 million. The Hampshire Enchanted ChildLine Ball is part of this huge fundraising effort.

Visit the Child's Voice Appeal website for more information


With the money raised we will be able to expand our services across the UK, recruiting an extra 1,786 volunteers who will be able to answer 1,100,000 calls per year.

We’ll be able to increase our answer rate and talk to 90 per cent of the
1 million-plus calls we receive every year from children. We’ll also be able to pick up the phone to 80 per cent of the 90,000 people who contact us on the adult helpline. But most importantly, the money will allow us to talk to vulnerable children in more ways by expanding our email and text counselling service. This means creating more facilities – such as buildings and phone lines – but also finding and training more volunteer counsellors to take those calls.  We’re also going to upgrade and expand our digital services so more children can contact us in different ways.

In 2006/7, we provided counselling to over 600,000 children. By 2011 we plan to provide counselling support for 1.2 million calls plus 380,000 online and SMS contacts.

Visit Childline