“It’s disappointing, it’s just another kicking,” said a youth worker after the town in which they work was labelled as the hardest place in which to be a child in England .

“It suggests our children are living unhappy lives,” said a teacher, who described her pupils as joyful.

A clearly riled Chris Cooke, the mayor of Middlesbrough , said: “We get told a lot by people outside this place what we are. We know what we are. There is another side.”

They were all reacting to a report published this week by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, titled The Childhood Lottery , in which she declared childhood to be in “a state of emergency”.

The report drew on a “landmark dataset” that “brings together 162 measures of children’s lives to build a comprehensive picture of the areas in England where it is the hardest to grow up”. The metrics included everything from child poverty to exclusion rates to poor air quality.…