AI transforming Childline's work

Childline's counsellors engage in hundreds of thousands of interactions with young people annually through various channels. Each interaction must be carefully documented and risk assessed, allowing counsellors to provide consistent support and, when necessary, share accurate information with authorities to protect vulnerable children. Tens of thousands of hours are spent annually on write-ups - when there are always more young people to reach.

HelpFirst's recent Proof of Concept project explored how AI could assist with this process. We explored machine-generated summaries of conversations and suggestions of risk categories.

The summaries achieved over 90% accuracy on quality metrics and could be produced in seconds, at a cost of only £0.02. Childline staff estimate this could reduce documentation time by up to 80%.

If fully operationalised this could potentially enable 60,000 additional counselling sessions annually – a 30% increase in the NSPCC's capacity to help young people in need.