h defined complexity as ‘describing multiple needs which require joined up responses from a range of professional specialists’, which underlines the need for adequately resourced and joined up partnership working. The Framework for Integrated Care offers a similar definition (NHS England and NHS Improvement, 2022). We are also seeing an increase in children of a younger age with complex needs – a third of our children living in children’s residential homes are now under 11 years of age. Whilst further exploration is required, this is likely to relate to children who should have started school during the pandemic but did not attend school or socialise and consequently struggled thereafter in a social and academic environment. (Survey, Unitary, South East Region) The increase in young people aged 16 years and over coming into care has been particularly noticeable in Phases 8 and 9, and one facet of complexity might reflect the cumulating adverse experiences of older children through their early years and childhoods. Nevertheless, it is also true that comments were made about increasing numbers of children from age eight upwards experiencing complex vulnerabilities leading to statutory involvement and, for some, care placement at the point of crisis or in the absence of other options. Pre-pandemic, the children whose needs escalated to this level of concern had most often been known to children’s social care for some time. Post-pandemic, SP9 respondents 67 described seeing more children and young people with complex needs with whom they had had no previous involvement for myriad reasons. The social isolation and concordant erosion of parents’ resilience to cope with children and young people’s behaviours in the pandemic and since, plus a lack of access to timely mental hea