This paper describes some of the results of research into automatic recognition of children's speech which has been conducted as part of the European Framework 5 'PF_STAR' project. Two new corpora of British English children's speech are described. The first comprises over 14 hours of read data from 159 children, while the second includes 1 hour and 23 minutes of spontaneous and emotional speech from 30 children. A partition of the data into training, evaluation and test sets is proposed, and the results of 'baseline' speech recognition experiments are presented. The results fail to demonstrate a significant improvement from the use of age dependent acoustic models, or that the emotional speech is more difficult to recognise than 'ordinary' spontaneous speech.