Overview
This PhD explores how “success” is defined and measured in responses to missing children, moving beyond narrow policing metrics. Working with the national charity, Missing People, the project will co-produce a robust outcomes framework to support more effective, preventative, and child-centred safeguarding practice.
About this opportunity
Children under 18 account for approximately 63% of the 330,000+ missing person reports made to UK police annually, with up to 75% involving repeat episodes. Similar trends are evident internationally, highlighting the systemic and persistent nature of missing children as a safeguarding issue. Children who go missing face heightened risk of harm, including criminal and sexual exploitation. Going missing also contributes to a range of long-term adverse outcomes, including increased vulnerability to victimisation, poor mental health, and disruption to education and employment trajectories. Children in local authority care are disproportionately affected, being three times more likely to go missing and to do so repeatedly compared to peers.
Although responsibility for responding to missing children is shared across multiple agencies, the police continue to bear a disproportionate burden. Responses are estimated to cost more than £394–£509 million annually. This reactive, policing-led model has been criticised for inefficiency, criminalisation of vulnerable children, and growing unsustainability as cases continue to rise. There is growing recognition of the need for a more preventative, multi-agency response, yet approaches vary widely across regions.
Research has begun to examine these variations to identify “what works” in preventing and responding to missing children. However, success is often measured narrowly using police metrics, such as whether a child is found, how quickly, and whether repeat episodes occur. These measures rarely capture the significance or broader impact of outcomes. For example, some evaluations of dedicated policing teams show that children were found faster but went missing more often. Those labelled “no apparent risk” remained missing longer, but the impact of prolonged absence is unclear. Such metrics overlook the complexity of outcomes, including children’s physical and psychological wellbeing, long-term safeguarding, family support, and systemic change. They also fail to account for context.
Consequently, policy and practice frameworks in many jurisdictions lack clear, evidence-based outcome indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, investigations, and post-return support. Lack of standardised outcome measures also results in gaps in accountability, resource allocation, and service delivery. Importantly, the perspectives of children, families, law enforcement, and social care are rarely integrated, leading to fragmented understandings of “success”. Without a shared understanding of outcomes, reactive practices may perpetuate cycles of risk.
This PhD will address these gaps by using a co-production method to develop a robust, child-centred outcomes framework to guide research, policy and practice.
Research Aims: Working in collaboration with the national charity Missing People, the successful candidate will:
- Critically review existing national and international frameworks, policies, and measures related to missing children.
- Explore how different stakeholders define “success” in missing child cases (e.g., children, families, police, social care, NGOs).
- Identify and prioritise short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes that reflect both procedural and child-centred measures of success.
- Develop and validate an outcomes framework for guiding practice, policy, and research.
- Make recommendations for integrating this framework into existing multi-agency safeguarding strategies.
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