The Children’s Media Foundation (CMF) has gathered a group of industry execs to call on the UK government to back local kids content.

At the center of the nonprofit’s lobbying efforts is a 161-page report called Our Children’s Future: Does Public Service Media Matter?, which argues that the government needs to provide more funding to pubcasters to better serve children. Core to the paper is the argument that, with the ongoing pandemic, kids are being underserved by public service media at a time when they really need entertaining and educational content to further their development.

In the report, industry members have called on the government to create new funding avenues for producers, as well as supporting opportunities for experimentation, such as producing more news programming for kids. According to a study commissioned by First News (and featured in the report), more than half (53%) of kids say they want to see more TV about other countries to better understand what’s happening around the world.

The CMF plans on presenting the document to UK media watchdog Ofcom, with the goal of ensuring that producers and broadcasters are making kids content that reflects all British kids.

Contributors to the initiative include Patricia Hidalgo, the BBC’s director of children’s and education; David Kleeman, Dubit’s SVP of global trends; Wincie Knight, ViacomCBS Networks International’s VP of global inclusion strategy; and Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

The CMF is providing the report as a free digital download to everyone attending its virtual Children’s Media Conference this week, and it also ran a debate at the event today about the future of public service media.

Photo by Zhenzhong Liu on Unsplash