How AI could help Childline counsellors spend more time talking to children and young people
How to help dedicated staff and volunteers spend more time supporting service users, and less time on admin?
Working with NSPCC's Childline service has opened my eyes to a challenge that is all too common in public services and the charity sector: how to help dedicated staff and volunteers spend more time supporting service users, and less time on admin?
Every year, Childline’s dedicated counsellors have hundreds of thousands of interactions with young people - through a combination of web chat, voice calls, and personal inbox messages. Each interaction must be carefully documented and risk assessed. This is vital for making sure the needs of any child or young person that reaches out for help remains at the heart of what Childline does. Good documentation is core to their holistic approach to safeguarding; it saves the young person having to repeat themselves if they come back again, and, in the rare instances where Childline need to take action to keep a child safe, it means they can share accurate information with external authorities to protect those that need it most.
But here's the challenge: writing up a typical counselling session can take a long time, especially because staff and volunteers know the importance of getting it right. Tens of thousands of hours are necessarily spent annually on documentation, when there are always more children and young people that could be reached.
Earlier this year, HelpFirst conducted a Proof of Concept project with Childline to explore how AI could help. The goal wasn't to replace human judgment, connection or empathy - those remain essential - but rather to assist with the time-consuming tasks of summarising the content of a conversation and suggesting relevant coding categories (which are a vital way of how Childline evidences the voice of the child and the impact of its services). We experimented with different AI methods to generate draft write-ups that could be reviewed and modified.
The results exceeded everyone’s expectations. The AI-generated summaries achieved over 90% accuracy on Childline's quality assurance metrics. Summaries could be generated in seconds at a cost of pennies, and Childline staff estimate that, if fully operationalised, this has the potential to reduce write-up time by up to 80%.
What does this mean in real terms? The time saved is estimated at enabling Childline to deliver up to 60,000 additional counselling sessions with children and young people per year (a 30% increase in capacity).
Beyond the core task of session write-ups, we've identified other valuable applications of this technology. AI could provide quick summaries of a young person's contact history at the start of a session, it could support more in-depth reviews for Childline’s regular service users, and generate live summaries of ongoing interactions to support those managing Childline shifts. The NSPCC is also looking at how these same principles could also apply to its NSPCC Helpline, where adults with concerns about children or young people can contact specialist staff for advice, guidance and support.
My three take aways:
- Start with service design. While AI technology is advancing rapidly, the real challenge lies in understanding user needs and designing solutions that truly serve them. We spent considerable time working with NSPCC staff to define exactly what makes a good summary and how to structure information most usefully.
- Custom summaries are much better than off the shelf solutions. Tools that create a general summary from a transcript or set of case notes can miss crucial information, hallucinate (make things up) or be confusing. Some LLMs are more familiar with the kind of language seen in counselling (and similar services) than others. But more importantly, customising the model with prompt engineering and fine tuning can make a huge difference
- Enabling staff to speed up, not full automation. Staff add the most value by using their experience to weigh up risk and protective factors and make decisions about what action to take. Our approach focused on using AI to handle the time-consuming tasks of gathering and organising information, freeing up staff to focus on direct interactions, analysis and judgment. It’s essential to retain the human element of checking AI-generated content, with the ability to make changes and improve the system.
“In only 3 months, HelpFirst have proven how the use of AI, if adopted safely and with careful consideration, could transform our reach for children and young people. The solution demonstrated over 90% accuracy on our QA metrics whilst showing the potential to reduce our write-up time by up to 80%. If fully operationalised this could enable Childline to deliver an additional 60,000 counselling sessions a year (an increase in capacity of 30%). At the start, AI was purely conceptual - now it's a potential game changer. HelpFirst's deep understanding of our needs, flexibility and technical capabilities made this project remarkably easy for us. From the excellent demos to the meticulous documentation and governance, every aspect has been first-class. They helped us articulate the real possibilities of AI within our organisation.”
- Ross Copland, Head of Transformation, NSPCC
The Priority Services Register (PSR) is a key tool that energy suppliers use to fulfil their responsibilities to vulnerable customers. But there isn't just one register. Every energy company has their own PSR and the application forms vary unpredictably from supplier to supplier.
As part of our CivTech Challenge, we’ve been researching best practice across the industry. We were left with lots of questions:
- Why is 'restricted hand movement' a vulnerability that almost all suppliers assess?
- Why are archaic phrases like ‘bedridden’ used?
- Why does only one supplier check if their vulnerable customers use ‘electric showering’?
Alas, we weren't able to fully answer these questions. But here’s a visual guide to various PSR forms, so you can get an overview of the landscape.
Overview
We accessed PSR application forms for Ovo Energy, British Gas, SSE, Octopus, EDF, Shell and Utilita. For many other suppliers, access is restricted.
The first observation is that the application forms are extremely varied:
- We’ve grouped questions into categories to make things a bit easier to read, however the forms themselves come in very different structures. Some offer all their options in one long list, some separate into smaller sections. Some only show certain sections once a customer has selected a particular option (e.g. selecting ‘sight loss’ gets you extra questions on the Shell application).
- Several vulnerabilities are only mentioned by one supplier. Only one asks about autism, and another asks about breathing difficulties. The following options only showed up once: ‘female presence preferred’, ‘longer time to answer the door’ and ‘bedridden’.
- For sensory needs: ‘blind’ and ‘partially sighted’ are separate options in all the forms. 'Hearing impairment' and 'deaf' are combined in half the forms and the former is not asked at all in one. This may be contentious, as hearing impairment and being deaf are very different conditions.
- Some suppliers include options for accessible information provision in the same form (i.e. braille, large print letters, etc.) Others link to an additional form, or do not reference it at all.
- When temporary conditions are mentioned, only some suppliers allow the customer to select a date when they believe the condition will no longer apply.
- Most of the forms are multiple choice, limiting to what the supplier chooses to ask about. Occasionally the supplier (e.g. EDF) gives the customer a larger space to talk about their conditions, equipment and needs in more detail.
Next, we dive deeper into the application forms.
Medical Conditions2
EDF’s application form has the highest number of options related to medical conditions (20 in total) with British Gas and Utilita featuring the lowest (13). EDF also features options which cover multiple medical conditions (e.g. 'breathing difficulties', 'disability benefits') more frequently than other suppliers. SSE has the highest number of options for learning and mental health related conditions (including 'dyslexia', 'autism', 'learning difficulties' and 'anxiety/depression').
There is some overlap within options, which could be confusing. For example, SSE lists both ‘developmental condition’ and ‘autism’ separately, even though the latter is a type of the former. Another example is the ‘mental ill health’ and ‘anxiety/depression’ options, again found in the SSE form. It is not clear if customers should tick both or only the more specific option.
All organisations feature options to indicate older age, however they specify a variety of different ages as the lower threshold, including: 60+, 65+, 'pensionable age' or 'pensioner'. British Gas have two separate options relating to older age ('pensionable age (65 and over)' and 'age 75 and over').
There is some degree of consistency across organisations. This appears to be where specific conditions have been mentioned within the Ofgem guidance (for instance, 'restricted hand movement' appears in all but one form, in spite of the fact this is a very specific need).
Language Used
The language used across suppliers is very inconsistent. SSE uses ‘hard of hearing’ and ‘deaf’ to describe hearing loss-related needs, while other suppliers employ terms such as ‘hearing impairment’ or ‘hearing impaired’.
Some options have multiple potential meanings: ‘carer’ could refer to the respondent either needing a carer or being a carer for someone else.
All suppliers ask about speech and language difficulties and broader language barriers. However there is no shared way of asking whether a customer speaks English. Variations include: 'unable to communicate in English', 'language barrier' and 'foreign language speaker'.
‘Unable to communicate in English’ (used by Octopus and Ovo) is somewhat ambiguous. Customers might take it to mean having a different first language or having a speech condition. The requirements are quite different: with the former you could use an interpreter or multilingual support, with the latter you would need different support.
Medical Equipment3
Options Offered
British Gas do not offer any specific options for types of medical equipment: they solely offer the generic category ‘mains powered electric medical equipment’. All other organisations surveyed have more specific options. These are broadly consistent across suppliers with some more limited options (e.g. ‘wheelchair’, ‘MDE electric showering’).
Most organisations (bar British Gas and EDF) also ask about reliance on water.
Language Used
It is unclear what is meant by the ‘life support’ option used by EDF. Often the phrase ‘life support machine’ refers to a ventilator, but EDF also have a separate option for ‘heart and lung ventilators’. It could mean life support as a condition or set of needs but that seems too broad for the PSR.
Temporary Changes
In a rare show of unanimity, all suppliers offer the same options for temporary changes.
householder <18
and under
Other Questions
Passwords
All suppliers offered the option of setting up a password or PIN. This is usually so a technician can state this password as an additional security measure on home visits. Two suppliers required a 6-letter password, one an 8-letter password and one a 10-letter password. A final supplier did not specify length. An unfortunate side effect of this variation is that if an individual were to move supplier, they may need to change their password and remember a new one. (Note: not shown in an infographic.)
Life Scenarios
Varying from the multiple choice standard, Shell veer into first person narratives. In their ‘Nominee Scheme’ section of the form, they feature an additional tick box option: ‘I can be easily confused and worried by communications from my energy supplier’. When asking about meter support they offer: ‘I have a prepayment meter and no-one in my household is able to safely read it or top it up’.
Accessibility Information4
Organisations vary on including accessibility questions on their PSR form. Ovo offers seven different accessibility options for receiving information, while Shell offers a single broad range checkbox.
Conclusions
Suppliers diverge considerably in what information they collect on their customers to register them for Priority Services support.
On our travels we encountered the aspiration to create a more standardised or universal PSR. Initiatives like the Vulnerability Registration Service and Experian’s Support Hub aim in this direction. In the future we are keen to explore the user experience of these services and how they aid vulnerable customers.
In the meantime, we hope this analysis will prove useful if you are looking to improve the experience of vulnerable energy customers. Any questions or comments, contact harriet@helpfirst.ai. We’d love to hear from you!
Footnotes
- SSE was acquired by Ovo Energy in 2020. They hadn't completed their move over when we started this research and were still registering people to their PSR. We’ve included them in this analysis as their approach was interesting with many mental health and developmental condition-type questions.
- Some questions have been condensed in the infographics. Numbers referenced in the discussion refer to the full options as available on the questionnaires, but the infographics demonstrate a condensed version for brevity and ease of visualisation. Full original data is available on request.
- 'Heart/lung machine & ventilator' is the most common formulation of question regarding this equipment. However EDF separates these questions into: 'heart/lung machine' and 'ventilator'.
- Octopus and British Gas do not ask about accessibility. Shell only offers a general ‘accessible information’ needs tick box if the customer has earlier selected that they have a visual impairment. This does not mean they do not record this information elsewhere, where these questions did not appear on their forms we were not able to verify what (or if) they ask about accessible information.
