It highlighted that the UK continues to score worse than the OECD average on household income, living space and educational resources in the home, as well as on reading and science literacy – though with better results on health, exercise and mathematical literacy.
The report follows earlier UNICEF reports that had shown child wellbeing in the UK the lowest of more than 20 developed continues. As with previous reports, there is a difficulty with the age of the data. UNICEF acknowledges that report card nine relies on information that predates the economic crash of 2008. But that surely means that the position on income poverty is now likely to be worse, in turn risking deterioration in other outcomes.
So it was worrying to read, in an often-useful report by former Labour social security minister Frank Field, also published last week, that too much attention has been given to income poverty in addressing child outcomes, and the target on child poverty in the Child Poverty Act should be seen as a mistake. While it’s certainly right that the experience of poverty goes beyond lack of money, it’s surely time we stopped arguing about whether money matters, and began to address all aspects of poverty, rather than setting out, not for the first time, to contest what poverty actually means.
Money is important; inadequate family incomes are closely and causally correlated with a range of poor outcomes for kids. It doesn’t take a great deal of thought to understand why – it’s about what money can buy. The UNICEF report makes this starkly clear, highlighting, for example, the lack of quiet space at home to do homework if unaffordable rents mean a family’s forced to live in overcrowded accommodation, that poorer families can’t afford to have a computer to aid children with research and study, and the challenge faced by parents in long hours low paid employment, who want to support their children’s learning, but who despite being in work still face poverty. It’s family income that enables parents to pay the bills, to provide a healthy diet that sends children off to school well nourished and ready to learn, and to offer the extracurricular support (music lessons, trips and so on) that enhances children’s education.
So if we’re interested in improving children’s outcomes, we have to address family income poverty too. Money isn’t separate from what enables children to do well, it’s integral to success. But Field is right to say that on its own it’s not enough, and his emphasis on the importance of high quality early years provision is especially welcome. He points out that children from poorer backgrounds are already falling behind their better off peers by the time they start school, and that the position worsens as they proceed through school. Despite Labour’s strong track record of investment in education and an overall improvement in school standards, investment in our early years and education system must also be designed to address the imbalance that remains.
Many of Field’s suggestions are sensible on this, and will be welcomed by children’s advocates. He’s right that we should position children’s centres as the hub of communities, right in his idea of local commissions on child poverty and lifechances, and offers some interesting proposals for tracking a broad range of indicators of child outcomes. He’s right too to recognise that the disparity in outcomes that increases as children proceed through school is exacerbated by what happens in the home. Yet here again surely we’re returned to incomes: parental capacity can’t just be about the parenting styles and skills highlighted in the report’s proposals, it’s also about the choices and resources that parents can access.
It’s a pity therefore that Field suggests that spending should be diverted in future from increasing financial benefits that support children, in order to pay for the reforms he proposes. The question that remains unanswered is surely why one group of children has to pay for improving the lifechances of another group of kids, risking poorer outcomes for more children. Children after all did not cause the financial crisis. They should not have to pay for it.
Refreshing and important. Surely we have to look at all the others of a child’s life to ensure we give them every chance. I would like to read this Unicef report – can you direct me to it?
this should be it: http://www.unicef.org.uk/Latest/News/Report-Card-9/
This is a policy in the context of a raft of policies that create poverty, and widen the net or who is caught in it considerably. In work poverty is a rapidlygrowing problem, and we are about to see state support pulled away from people who are already doing everything they can possibly do. Lone parents who are working are highly likely to be overrepresented. Motherhood is a cause of poverty, and is often a cause of poverty long after your aspirations are formed. The need for a Surestart centre to be the centre of a community, for those poor people to be educated to be ‘better’- is downright insulting to the millions of families not in poverty due to low aspirations but due to low wages and high house prices. The damage that poverty does to people’s ability to parent, income poverty- on their mental and physical health- and the effect of that in outcomes is vast. It is unmissable. Yet Frank Field has centred a solution to poverty around rearranging your entire bloody life round a Surestart centre- where you could be ‘taught’ to be better. Surestart is an excellent problem, for women who want and need to use it. Poverty is by no means an indication that you would fall in that group- in fact most women with kids, minus a husband would fall into it. Frank Fields report comes on the back of some of the most dubious social policy research of recent years- couples penalties taht dont actually exist when you calculate incoming against outgoings. He doesnt address the problem of childcare for while you work. And in one report he pretty much sumises that the benefits system should encourage women to get married(a romantic relationship a route out of poverty for any other groups?)- the cuts that have happened have literally made it impossible forworking poor families to stay in their areas, or stay in their jobs. In the centre of a raft of policies designed to create poverty, especially mothers- I find the suggestion that I rearrange my life round a Surestart centre, so a professional I am qualified to train can teach me to be a better parent. This would not have helped when I was fighting debt collectors, it wont help when you are facing homelessness, and it doesnt stop youo overreacting because your two year old has taken a little bite out of every piece of fruit in the bowl, and you know that that means there will be no fruit for the next week. It is insulting misogynist drivel which is likely to cause a great deal of hardship. Who is paying for these extensions to Surestart? THe people they are ‘helping’.
Take a look at the figures about the rise in in work poor. The ‘poor’ are not necessarily people who are poor and from areas of deprivation. Your teachers, your council staff- your friends. Treating low aspirations as the cause of poverty, while deliberately increasing it. and withdrawing state support for it- and then coming up with a solution that relies on the assumption that people need to be taught to be ‘better’ is one thing. The fact that so many of our media believe that the ‘poor’ are somehow seperate from you. You might want to at least test that assumption with a look at the income ranges living in harship- in the context of our wages, and house prices.