After 50 years the BBC is axing the final half hour of children’s radio on its mainstream networks. Children’s radio champion and former Magpie presenter Susan Stranks, from Hove, argues that radio for children is so important for childrens’ development - and that perhaps the BBC should think again.

One, two, three, four, five …
Once I caught a fish alive.
Six, Seven, eight, nine, ten
Then I let him go again . . .

What we learn through song and rhyme when we’re very young tends to stick and there’s plenty of evidence to show that singing and making music from babyhood gives children a head start when they begin school.

Yet traditional children’s rhymes are rarely heard and a recent survey found that more than a quarter of parents and carers admitted they prefer to sing along to the pop charts with their kids.

But pop lyrics, if you can decipher them at all, tend to be about adult relationships and teen angst or – in these days of gangsta-rap – knives and guns: unsuitable and certainly irrelevant for the very young.

Whereas the rhyme above can help children learn to count and identify right from left, as well as being fun and easy to understand.

Songs like these shared every day encourage comprehension, memory, increased vocabulary, clear diction and physical coordination through music, movement and gesture.

For over three years I ran an experiment in London called abracaDABra!

It was the world’s first digital (DAB) radio station for children, providing a pop-free zone with a daily mix of nursery, folk, lullaby and novelty songs and light classical music, intertwined with stories, poems, fun and games.

The trial proved its worth. Delighted parents told us that daily listening encouraged their toddlers to chatter and communicate and that even the title chimed well with baby babble. Older children loved participating in making programmes too.

To learn to talk we must first learn to listen and professionals in child care and language therapy confirm that radio brings a balance to the dominant screen and keyboard culture that is frequently linked with increases in childhood obesity, attention disorders and language delay.

Yet in an astonishing anomaly in UK broadcasting legislation children's television is protected but not their radio. Conversely listeners aged 15 and above have their radio choice mandated and enjoy many hundreds of stations.

By what criteria do policy makers deem radio to be less important than television for the young when so many consider it a preferable medium for children, especially in their early years? Last year France banned television made for children under three years old, and in the US, TV channels targeting babies are a focus of growing concern by specialists in early development.

For decades the BBC claimed children didn't want radio, only TV and pop music. The rest, they said, could buy CDs. Do we remove fresh fruit and green vegetables because most kids prefer burgers and pop? I don’t think so.

Children's programmes were shuffled from slot to slot and network to network and at one stage shelved entirely while adults enjoyed ever more listening choice ... and could also buy CDs.

Last year the BBC spent more than £460 million on ten national radio stations and six channels in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, of which just £1.6m went on children’s programmes: an apt illustration of the disdain Auntie has for her young listeners.

Next month Auntie will axe Go4It – the last half hour of children’s radio on her mainstream networks and the budget will go to grown-ups.

The reason given is that only 20,000 children tuned in, but the cull has been widely condemned in the media and drawn complaints from children, parents and teachers. Just 23 hours a week remains for young listeners, on digital R7 – an even less accessible adult speech channel.

Trustees of the BBC are calling for ‘practical partnerships’ to reduce a public service broadcasting funding gap of up to £235 million and it makes sound sense to start with national children’s radio.

The BBC has run out of digital audio space but a non-profit partnership could deploy one of the vacant independent networks for a pilot study, to which the BBC could contribute its archive of children’s material and share technical resources with the independent sector to maintain a service dedicated to young children. The pilot could run alongside the government’s £52 million Speech, Language and Communication Needs Action Plan leading up to and complementing the National Year of Speech, Language and Communication in 2011–12. Independent evaluation could assess its long-term viability.

Never before has there been so much focus on serving and supporting families with young children and, as an addition to the nation’s child care, education and leisure services, a dedicated radio network would cost little more than a single school to operate.

For more than 20 years we’ve begged Whitehall to grant children their own radio network – let’s do it now.