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Age assessments
“You can’t stop feeling sad. You have to feel sad and angry when someone says you are a liar. It is in your heart.”
Children being treated as adults
“It must be because the Home Office have a lot of issues and they get angry, they get hostile, they blame it on the kids. My age is my age, I’m not lying about it.”
Children seeking safety in the UK on their own need what any child needs: care, support, trust. But thousands of children are denied any of the support they are entitled to when they are wrongly treated as adults.
We work with children who have been sent into the adult asylum system after Home Office officials refused to believe their age. They don’t want to see other children go through what they have gone through. They’re sharing their experiences, holding the Home Office to account, and supporting other young people.
We demand:
1. An end to Home Office involvement in assessing age.
No more age assessments at the UK border.
Local authorities must have autonomy to act in children’s best interests.
If age must be assessed, it should only ever be done by local authority social workers who are trained in holistic age assessments.
2. Abolish the National Age Assessment Board.
The funding should instead be used to support local authorities.
3. No use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or medical testing in age assessments.
There is no “scientific” way to assess age.
“This system destroys you”: Children trapped in adult asylum hotels by the Home Office
“I told him my age, he put down I was 24. I said no I am not, this is not okay, this is not fair. They said you do not speak, we know how old you are, we will put this as your real age. I stopped explaining because I felt that there was no point, I was too scared.”
In 2025 we published a report based on children’s experiences being sent to asylum hotels after being wrongfully labelled adults by border officials. Children from the All4One group shared their experiences at the border and in asylum hotels. We gave detailed recommendations to the Home Office, local authorities and accommodation providers.
Young people’s guide to age assessments
Youth Support Collective, a group of young people with lived experience of age assessments by the Home Office, has created a guide to support others going through the process and to help social workers navigate it too.
The guide was created by young people, for young people, in collaboration with GMIAU, the Refugee Council, and young people involved in the Childhood First project. This is an updated version of the original guide created by young people and GMIAU in 2020.
The guide is available in 9 languages: English, Arabic, Tigrinya, Amharic, Pashto, Kurdish Sorani, Dari, Vietnamese, and Oromo. All can be accessed through the same link.
Other publications
Children and young people who we work with through the All4One group have shared their experiences of age assessments with us in research reports and briefings.
The National Age Assessment Board: children's experiences
The National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), formed in 2022, is part of the Home Office and operates according to their political agenda. Their assessments do not follow established age assessment guidance, and cause distress, retraumatisation, mental health crisis, and ongoing trust issues for children. We are calling for the NAAB to be abolished.
A letter to the Home Secretary from children trapped in asylum hotels
Children who had worked on our 2025 report also wrote directly to the Home Secretary. They said "We ask you to hear us, acknowledge what we have been through, and change this system – it’s terrible. We don’t want the young people who come after us to go through what we have gone through.”
“I’m terrified”: the dangers of Home Office Age Assessments (2022)
We have been raising the alarm about Home Office age assessments at the border for a number of years. In 2022 we published a report about the hundreds of children being sent to adult accommodation and about the experiences of Afran, who told us that officials at the border had laughed at him before sending him to adult asylum accommodation.
Support for professionals
As well as targeting the Home Office, the root of harmful age assessment practices, we want to ensure local authority practice improves in supporting children whose ages are disputed. We’ve produced information sheets and guidance for social workers and other professionals.
Information sheet: age assessments in the North West
This information sheet is for local authorities and anyone working either with unaccompanied children seeking asylum or in Home Office asylum accommodation. It details the problems we are seeing for children who are age disputed and the processes that should be followed.
#SixThings
Young people developed three information sheets with the #SixThings they want social workers, appropriate adults and interpreters to know about the age assessment process.
Above all, young people wanted the adults involved to understand just how important their role is as well as how significant (and upsetting) it is for young people to have their ages disbelieved.
Social workers | Appropriate adults | Interpreters
Media coverage
Our work on age assessments has been covered in local and national media.
Manchester Evening News
The Manchester Evening News covered our 2025 report on children trapped in adult asylum hotels.
The Guardian
The Guardian covered our 2022 report on the dangers of Home Office age assessments.
Context news
We were quoted in this Context News piece about the Home Office's plans to use AI in age assessments.
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